#psychologystudy — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #psychologystudy, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: August 6, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Cognitive abilities predict how well people manage their emotional responses
A recent study reveals that accumulated life knowledge helps adults manage their emotions across a variety of situations, while the ability to process new information quickly is primarily helpful for reducing negative feelings. Older adults exhibited more difficulty dampening negative emotions like disgust and sadness compared to younger adults, but they maintained the ability to boost positive emotions. The research was published in the journal Emotion.
As people age, their cognitive abilities undergo distinct changes. Some mental skills decline, while others remain stable or even improve. Researchers divide these mental abilities into two broad categories known as fluid cognition and crystallized cognition.
Fluid cognition refers to the brain’s ability to access, process, and manipulate information in real time. It encompasses processing speed, working memory, and the capacity to shift attention quickly. This type of mental agility tends to peak in early adulthood and slowly declines as people get older.
Crystallized cognition represents the knowledge and skills a person acquires over a lifetime. It includes vocabulary, reading comprehension, and an understanding of social situations. Unlike fluid cognition, crystallized cognition generally remains stable or continues to grow well into older adulthood.
Psychologists have sought to understand how these shifting cognitive resources affect emotion regulation. Emotion regulation is the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these feelings. Successfully managing emotions is tied to overall psychological health and life satisfaction.
The research team, led by psychologist Claire M. Growney of Stanford University, alongside David A. Balota and Tammy English of Washington University in St. Louis, investigated how aging and cognitive abilities relate to emotion regulation. They wanted to see if older adults rely on their acquired knowledge to regulate emotions or if declines in fluid cognition make certain emotional situations harder to manage.
Prior research often focused on how people reduce negative feelings. This study expanded that focus to include how people amplify or maintain positive feelings. The researchers aimed to identify the conditions under which age-related advantages or vulnerabilities in emotional management emerge.
To explore these questions, the research team recruited 286 adults ranging in age from 25 to 85. The participants lived in the St. Louis, Missouri, area and represented a diverse cross-section of socioeconomic backgrounds. None of the participants exhibited signs of cognitive impairment or dementia.
The participants first completed a standard battery of tests to assess their cognitive abilities. They engaged in tasks that measured their processing speed, cognitive flexibility, and memory to establish a fluid cognition score. They also completed reading and vocabulary tests to establish a crystallized cognition score.
Next, the participants took part in a laboratory emotion regulation task. They sat alone at a computer while a camera recorded their facial expressions. They watched a series of short film clips validated by previous research to elicit specific emotional responses.
During the first phase of the task, participants watched clips meant to induce disgust, sadness, amusement, and contentment. They were instructed to react naturally and not try to change how they felt. This phase established a baseline for how strongly each person normally reacted to the emotional content.
In the second phase, participants watched a new set of clips eliciting the same four emotions. This time, they received explicit instructions to regulate their feelings. For the sadness and disgust videos, they were told to use any strategy they wanted to make themselves feel less negative.
For the amusement and contentment videos, the instructions shifted. Participants were asked to manage their emotions so that they felt more positive, keeping the good feelings going. After each video, the participants rated the intensity of the specific emotion they experienced on a numerical scale.
In addition to self-reported emotional experience, the researchers used artificial intelligence software to analyze the participants’ facial expressions. The automated program scanned the video recordings and scored the presence and intensity of specific emotions on participants’ faces. This provided a secondary, behavioral measure of how successfully the participants regulated their emotions.
The results revealed distinct patterns in how cognitive abilities relate to emotional management. Participants who scored higher on the crystallized cognition tests were more successful at regulating their emotions across the board. This advantage appeared regardless of whether they were trying to reduce negative emotions or enhance positive ones.
The benefits of crystallized cognition were visible in both the participants’ self-reported feelings and their computer-analyzed facial expressions. The researchers suggest that a vast repository of life experience and vocabulary gives people a wider range of strategies to manage their feelings. People with high crystallized cognition might be better at labeling their emotions and selecting the right mental tool for a given situation.
Fluid cognition, on the other hand, was only associated with success in specific scenarios. Participants with higher fluid cognitive abilities were better at reducing their negative emotional experiences when watching the disgust and sadness clips. This type of fast, flexible thinking was not associated with the ability to boost positive emotions like amusement and contentment.
Dampening negative emotions might require more mental effort than enjoying positive ones. Decreasing sadness or disgust often requires a person to quickly shift their attention away from distressing information or rapidly reframe the meaning of a situation. These mental maneuvers rely heavily on the working memory and processing speed captured by fluid cognition tests.
The study also uncovered nuanced associations between age and emotion regulation. Older age was associated with less success in decreasing the experience of sadness and disgust. This pattern was consistent for both internal feelings and outward facial expressions.
The researchers note that negative, high-arousal emotions like disgust might pose specific physiological challenges for older adults. Alternatively, older adults might find it harder to detach from social loss themes present in sad videos due to shifting emotional priorities. As people age, they often become more prosocial and empathetic, which might make it harder to turn off feelings of sadness when witnessing others in distress.
Despite these difficulties with negative content, older adults were just as successful as younger adults at maintaining or amplifying positive emotions. Enhancing positive feelings often involves savoring a moment or elaborating on pleasant thoughts. This approach aligns well with the motivational goals of older adults, who tend to prioritize emotional well-being and positive experiences.
The researchers also tested whether possessing high cognitive abilities could offset the age-related difficulties in managing negative emotions. The statistical analysis showed no interaction between age and cognitive test performance. The benefits of crystallized cognition and the challenges associated with older age operated independently of each other.
While the study provides a detailed look at emotion regulation, the research has limitations. The study was cross-sectional, meaning it measured different people of different ages at a single point in time. This design prevents researchers from tracking how an individual’s emotion regulation skills might change as they grow older.
The laboratory setting also presents specific constraints. Participants were required to watch intensely emotional film clips, which might not reflect the emotional situations they encounter in daily life. In the real world, people often regulate their emotions by choosing which situations to enter or avoid entirely, an option not available during the computer task.
The use of artificial intelligence to code facial expressions is another factor to consider. Automated coding offers an objective measure of facial movements, but outward expressions do not always perfectly align with internal feelings. Some individuals might naturally express less emotion on their faces, especially when sitting alone in a room without an audience.
Future studies might explore a wider variety of emotions, such as fear or joy, to see if the patterns hold true. Researchers are also interested in examining how people select specific emotional strategies in their daily lives compared to what they do in a controlled laboratory environment. Understanding how life experience contributes to everyday emotional wellness remains an active area of psychological research.
The study, “Fluid and Crystallized Cognitive Abilities Differentially Predict Successful Regulation of Positive versus Negative Emotion,” was authored by Claire M. Growney, David A. Balota, and Tammy English.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #CognitiveAging #CrystallizedCognition #FluidCognition #EmotionRegulation #PositiveEmotion #NegativeEmotion #AgingAndEmotion #StanfordResearch #PsychologyStudy #CognitiveAbilities
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DATE: August 6, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Cognitive abilities predict how well people manage their emotional responses
A recent study reveals that accumulated life knowledge helps adults manage their emotions across a variety of situations, while the ability to process new information quickly is primarily helpful for reducing negative feelings. Older adults exhibited more difficulty dampening negative emotions like disgust and sadness compared to younger adults, but they maintained the ability to boost positive emotions. The research was published in the journal Emotion.
As people age, their cognitive abilities undergo distinct changes. Some mental skills decline, while others remain stable or even improve. Researchers divide these mental abilities into two broad categories known as fluid cognition and crystallized cognition.
Fluid cognition refers to the brain’s ability to access, process, and manipulate information in real time. It encompasses processing speed, working memory, and the capacity to shift attention quickly. This type of mental agility tends to peak in early adulthood and slowly declines as people get older.
Crystallized cognition represents the knowledge and skills a person acquires over a lifetime. It includes vocabulary, reading comprehension, and an understanding of social situations. Unlike fluid cognition, crystallized cognition generally remains stable or continues to grow well into older adulthood.
Psychologists have sought to understand how these shifting cognitive resources affect emotion regulation. Emotion regulation is the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these feelings. Successfully managing emotions is tied to overall psychological health and life satisfaction.
The research team, led by psychologist Claire M. Growney of Stanford University, alongside David A. Balota and Tammy English of Washington University in St. Louis, investigated how aging and cognitive abilities relate to emotion regulation. They wanted to see if older adults rely on their acquired knowledge to regulate emotions or if declines in fluid cognition make certain emotional situations harder to manage.
Prior research often focused on how people reduce negative feelings. This study expanded that focus to include how people amplify or maintain positive feelings. The researchers aimed to identify the conditions under which age-related advantages or vulnerabilities in emotional management emerge.
To explore these questions, the research team recruited 286 adults ranging in age from 25 to 85. The participants lived in the St. Louis, Missouri, area and represented a diverse cross-section of socioeconomic backgrounds. None of the participants exhibited signs of cognitive impairment or dementia.
The participants first completed a standard battery of tests to assess their cognitive abilities. They engaged in tasks that measured their processing speed, cognitive flexibility, and memory to establish a fluid cognition score. They also completed reading and vocabulary tests to establish a crystallized cognition score.
Next, the participants took part in a laboratory emotion regulation task. They sat alone at a computer while a camera recorded their facial expressions. They watched a series of short film clips validated by previous research to elicit specific emotional responses.
During the first phase of the task, participants watched clips meant to induce disgust, sadness, amusement, and contentment. They were instructed to react naturally and not try to change how they felt. This phase established a baseline for how strongly each person normally reacted to the emotional content.
In the second phase, participants watched a new set of clips eliciting the same four emotions. This time, they received explicit instructions to regulate their feelings. For the sadness and disgust videos, they were told to use any strategy they wanted to make themselves feel less negative.
For the amusement and contentment videos, the instructions shifted. Participants were asked to manage their emotions so that they felt more positive, keeping the good feelings going. After each video, the participants rated the intensity of the specific emotion they experienced on a numerical scale.
In addition to self-reported emotional experience, the researchers used artificial intelligence software to analyze the participants’ facial expressions. The automated program scanned the video recordings and scored the presence and intensity of specific emotions on participants’ faces. This provided a secondary, behavioral measure of how successfully the participants regulated their emotions.
The results revealed distinct patterns in how cognitive abilities relate to emotional management. Participants who scored higher on the crystallized cognition tests were more successful at regulating their emotions across the board. This advantage appeared regardless of whether they were trying to reduce negative emotions or enhance positive ones.
The benefits of crystallized cognition were visible in both the participants’ self-reported feelings and their computer-analyzed facial expressions. The researchers suggest that a vast repository of life experience and vocabulary gives people a wider range of strategies to manage their feelings. People with high crystallized cognition might be better at labeling their emotions and selecting the right mental tool for a given situation.
Fluid cognition, on the other hand, was only associated with success in specific scenarios. Participants with higher fluid cognitive abilities were better at reducing their negative emotional experiences when watching the disgust and sadness clips. This type of fast, flexible thinking was not associated with the ability to boost positive emotions like amusement and contentment.
Dampening negative emotions might require more mental effort than enjoying positive ones. Decreasing sadness or disgust often requires a person to quickly shift their attention away from distressing information or rapidly reframe the meaning of a situation. These mental maneuvers rely heavily on the working memory and processing speed captured by fluid cognition tests.
The study also uncovered nuanced associations between age and emotion regulation. Older age was associated with less success in decreasing the experience of sadness and disgust. This pattern was consistent for both internal feelings and outward facial expressions.
The researchers note that negative, high-arousal emotions like disgust might pose specific physiological challenges for older adults. Alternatively, older adults might find it harder to detach from social loss themes present in sad videos due to shifting emotional priorities. As people age, they often become more prosocial and empathetic, which might make it harder to turn off feelings of sadness when witnessing others in distress.
Despite these difficulties with negative content, older adults were just as successful as younger adults at maintaining or amplifying positive emotions. Enhancing positive feelings often involves savoring a moment or elaborating on pleasant thoughts. This approach aligns well with the motivational goals of older adults, who tend to prioritize emotional well-being and positive experiences.
The researchers also tested whether possessing high cognitive abilities could offset the age-related difficulties in managing negative emotions. The statistical analysis showed no interaction between age and cognitive test performance. The benefits of crystallized cognition and the challenges associated with older age operated independently of each other.
While the study provides a detailed look at emotion regulation, the research has limitations. The study was cross-sectional, meaning it measured different people of different ages at a single point in time. This design prevents researchers from tracking how an individual’s emotion regulation skills might change as they grow older.
The laboratory setting also presents specific constraints. Participants were required to watch intensely emotional film clips, which might not reflect the emotional situations they encounter in daily life. In the real world, people often regulate their emotions by choosing which situations to enter or avoid entirely, an option not available during the computer task.
The use of artificial intelligence to code facial expressions is another factor to consider. Automated coding offers an objective measure of facial movements, but outward expressions do not always perfectly align with internal feelings. Some individuals might naturally express less emotion on their faces, especially when sitting alone in a room without an audience.
Future studies might explore a wider variety of emotions, such as fear or joy, to see if the patterns hold true. Researchers are also interested in examining how people select specific emotional strategies in their daily lives compared to what they do in a controlled laboratory environment. Understanding how life experience contributes to everyday emotional wellness remains an active area of psychological research.
The study, “Fluid and Crystallized Cognitive Abilities Differentially Predict Successful Regulation of Positive versus Negative Emotion,” was authored by Claire M. Growney, David A. Balota, and Tammy English.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #CognitiveAging #CrystallizedCognition #FluidCognition #EmotionRegulation #PositiveEmotion #NegativeEmotion #AgingAndEmotion #StanfordResearch #PsychologyStudy #CognitiveAbilities
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DATE: August 6, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Cognitive abilities predict how well people manage their emotional responses
A recent study reveals that accumulated life knowledge helps adults manage their emotions across a variety of situations, while the ability to process new information quickly is primarily helpful for reducing negative feelings. Older adults exhibited more difficulty dampening negative emotions like disgust and sadness compared to younger adults, but they maintained the ability to boost positive emotions. The research was published in the journal Emotion.
As people age, their cognitive abilities undergo distinct changes. Some mental skills decline, while others remain stable or even improve. Researchers divide these mental abilities into two broad categories known as fluid cognition and crystallized cognition.
Fluid cognition refers to the brain’s ability to access, process, and manipulate information in real time. It encompasses processing speed, working memory, and the capacity to shift attention quickly. This type of mental agility tends to peak in early adulthood and slowly declines as people get older.
Crystallized cognition represents the knowledge and skills a person acquires over a lifetime. It includes vocabulary, reading comprehension, and an understanding of social situations. Unlike fluid cognition, crystallized cognition generally remains stable or continues to grow well into older adulthood.
Psychologists have sought to understand how these shifting cognitive resources affect emotion regulation. Emotion regulation is the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these feelings. Successfully managing emotions is tied to overall psychological health and life satisfaction.
The research team, led by psychologist Claire M. Growney of Stanford University, alongside David A. Balota and Tammy English of Washington University in St. Louis, investigated how aging and cognitive abilities relate to emotion regulation. They wanted to see if older adults rely on their acquired knowledge to regulate emotions or if declines in fluid cognition make certain emotional situations harder to manage.
Prior research often focused on how people reduce negative feelings. This study expanded that focus to include how people amplify or maintain positive feelings. The researchers aimed to identify the conditions under which age-related advantages or vulnerabilities in emotional management emerge.
To explore these questions, the research team recruited 286 adults ranging in age from 25 to 85. The participants lived in the St. Louis, Missouri, area and represented a diverse cross-section of socioeconomic backgrounds. None of the participants exhibited signs of cognitive impairment or dementia.
The participants first completed a standard battery of tests to assess their cognitive abilities. They engaged in tasks that measured their processing speed, cognitive flexibility, and memory to establish a fluid cognition score. They also completed reading and vocabulary tests to establish a crystallized cognition score.
Next, the participants took part in a laboratory emotion regulation task. They sat alone at a computer while a camera recorded their facial expressions. They watched a series of short film clips validated by previous research to elicit specific emotional responses.
During the first phase of the task, participants watched clips meant to induce disgust, sadness, amusement, and contentment. They were instructed to react naturally and not try to change how they felt. This phase established a baseline for how strongly each person normally reacted to the emotional content.
In the second phase, participants watched a new set of clips eliciting the same four emotions. This time, they received explicit instructions to regulate their feelings. For the sadness and disgust videos, they were told to use any strategy they wanted to make themselves feel less negative.
For the amusement and contentment videos, the instructions shifted. Participants were asked to manage their emotions so that they felt more positive, keeping the good feelings going. After each video, the participants rated the intensity of the specific emotion they experienced on a numerical scale.
In addition to self-reported emotional experience, the researchers used artificial intelligence software to analyze the participants’ facial expressions. The automated program scanned the video recordings and scored the presence and intensity of specific emotions on participants’ faces. This provided a secondary, behavioral measure of how successfully the participants regulated their emotions.
The results revealed distinct patterns in how cognitive abilities relate to emotional management. Participants who scored higher on the crystallized cognition tests were more successful at regulating their emotions across the board. This advantage appeared regardless of whether they were trying to reduce negative emotions or enhance positive ones.
The benefits of crystallized cognition were visible in both the participants’ self-reported feelings and their computer-analyzed facial expressions. The researchers suggest that a vast repository of life experience and vocabulary gives people a wider range of strategies to manage their feelings. People with high crystallized cognition might be better at labeling their emotions and selecting the right mental tool for a given situation.
Fluid cognition, on the other hand, was only associated with success in specific scenarios. Participants with higher fluid cognitive abilities were better at reducing their negative emotional experiences when watching the disgust and sadness clips. This type of fast, flexible thinking was not associated with the ability to boost positive emotions like amusement and contentment.
Dampening negative emotions might require more mental effort than enjoying positive ones. Decreasing sadness or disgust often requires a person to quickly shift their attention away from distressing information or rapidly reframe the meaning of a situation. These mental maneuvers rely heavily on the working memory and processing speed captured by fluid cognition tests.
The study also uncovered nuanced associations between age and emotion regulation. Older age was associated with less success in decreasing the experience of sadness and disgust. This pattern was consistent for both internal feelings and outward facial expressions.
The researchers note that negative, high-arousal emotions like disgust might pose specific physiological challenges for older adults. Alternatively, older adults might find it harder to detach from social loss themes present in sad videos due to shifting emotional priorities. As people age, they often become more prosocial and empathetic, which might make it harder to turn off feelings of sadness when witnessing others in distress.
Despite these difficulties with negative content, older adults were just as successful as younger adults at maintaining or amplifying positive emotions. Enhancing positive feelings often involves savoring a moment or elaborating on pleasant thoughts. This approach aligns well with the motivational goals of older adults, who tend to prioritize emotional well-being and positive experiences.
The researchers also tested whether possessing high cognitive abilities could offset the age-related difficulties in managing negative emotions. The statistical analysis showed no interaction between age and cognitive test performance. The benefits of crystallized cognition and the challenges associated with older age operated independently of each other.
While the study provides a detailed look at emotion regulation, the research has limitations. The study was cross-sectional, meaning it measured different people of different ages at a single point in time. This design prevents researchers from tracking how an individual’s emotion regulation skills might change as they grow older.
The laboratory setting also presents specific constraints. Participants were required to watch intensely emotional film clips, which might not reflect the emotional situations they encounter in daily life. In the real world, people often regulate their emotions by choosing which situations to enter or avoid entirely, an option not available during the computer task.
The use of artificial intelligence to code facial expressions is another factor to consider. Automated coding offers an objective measure of facial movements, but outward expressions do not always perfectly align with internal feelings. Some individuals might naturally express less emotion on their faces, especially when sitting alone in a room without an audience.
Future studies might explore a wider variety of emotions, such as fear or joy, to see if the patterns hold true. Researchers are also interested in examining how people select specific emotional strategies in their daily lives compared to what they do in a controlled laboratory environment. Understanding how life experience contributes to everyday emotional wellness remains an active area of psychological research.
The study, “Fluid and Crystallized Cognitive Abilities Differentially Predict Successful Regulation of Positive versus Negative Emotion,” was authored by Claire M. Growney, David A. Balota, and Tammy English.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #CognitiveAging #CrystallizedCognition #FluidCognition #EmotionRegulation #PositiveEmotion #NegativeEmotion #AgingAndEmotion #StanfordResearch #PsychologyStudy #CognitiveAbilities
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DATE: August 3, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Body dysmorphia is linked to an exaggerated cognitive bias for self-related information
People with body dysmorphic tendencies learn and process self-related information more strongly than information about other people, according to new research. This exaggerated focus on the self extends even to neutral, everyday objects that have nothing to do with physical appearance. The findings, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, provide evidence that a basic bias in how the brain processes self-relevant information might contribute to severe body image preoccupations.
Body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, is a mental health condition characterized by an intense and distressing preoccupation with perceived flaws in physical appearance. Individuals with BDD often spend hours each day focusing on minor or imagined physical anomalies. This behavior tends to severely disrupt their daily lives, relationships, and social functioning.
“We were motivated to understand what underlying information-processing mechanisms may be contributing to the observed symptomatology of body dysmorphic disorder,” said Maria Richards-Brown, a researcher in the Department of Psychosis Studies at King’s College London. “Through understanding where information processing may differ as one exhibits more body dysmorphic symptoms, we can hopefully identify clinical treatment targets.”
To understand how this intense preoccupation develops, psychologists look at how the brain manages and assigns importance to different types of information. In the general population, people naturally display a “self-prioritization effect.”
“In the general population, individuals show a greater prioritization of processing information about themselves, compared to information about their best friend or a stranger,” Richards-Brown explained. “This is a well-known information processing bias.”
This psychological concept suggests that individuals process, learn, and recall information associated with themselves much faster and more accurately than information associated with other people. For example, if a person is asked to associate a random object with themselves and another object with a stranger, they will consistently recognize the self-associated object with greater ease.
Previous models suggest that BDD might emerge from a hyperactive self-attention network in the brain. This heightened internal focus could cause a person to pay excessive attention to self-related cues, magnifying normal bodily signals into intense preoccupations.
The authors of the current paper designed their research to test whether people with higher levels of body dysmorphic symptoms show an inflated version of this standard self-prioritization effect. They wanted to determine if this bias exists even when the information being processed has no connection to physical appearance.
In the first experiment, the scientists recruited 87 female participants through an online platform. The participants ranged in age from 32 to 71 years old. They completed a standard questionnaire used to screen for the presence and severity of BDD symptoms.
Next, participants completed an associative learning task. The researchers asked them to learn specific pairings between three geometric shapes (a triangle, a circle, and a square) and three personal labels (“You,” the first name of their best friend, and “Stranger”). After a brief learning period, the participants viewed a series of shape and label combinations on a screen.
For each trial, participants had a brief window to press a specific keyboard key to indicate whether the pairing on the screen matched the original associations they had learned, or if it was a mismatch. For instance, if they originally learned that a square represented “You,” they might later see a square paired with the word “Stranger,” which would be an incorrect mismatch.
Across the board, participants demonstrated the standard self-prioritization effect. They were more accurate and faster at correctly identifying matches involving the “You” label compared to the “Friend” or “Stranger” labels.
When factoring in the questionnaire scores, the authors found a specific pattern related to body image concerns. Participants with higher BDD symptom scores were more accurate at identifying the self-related pairings compared to the stranger-related pairings. This gap in accuracy between the self and the stranger was wider for those with higher body dysmorphic tendencies than for those with lower scores.
To confirm and expand upon these initial observations, the scientists conducted a second experiment with a new sample. This group included 173 participants, consisting of 135 females and 41 males ranging from 19 to 71 years old. The procedures were largely the same, but the researchers made the matching task slightly more difficult by flashing the shape-label pairings on the screen for a much shorter duration of 250 milliseconds.
In this second experiment, the researchers also administered two additional questionnaires. One measured symptoms of depression, and the other measured general impulsivity. They included these extra measures to control for the possibility that depression or impulsivity might account for any differences in learning speed or accuracy, rather than BDD symptoms.
The second experiment confirmed the exaggerated self-prioritization effect in individuals with higher body dysmorphic scores. In this iteration, participants with elevated BDD symptoms showed greater accuracy in identifying “You” matches compared to “Friend” matches. The reaction time data also revealed a tailored self-bias.
Participants with more BDD symptoms were disproportionately faster at identifying self-related pairings compared to both friend- and stranger-related pairings. The additional questionnaires provided helpful context for these outcomes. The researchers found that the influence of depression and impulsivity on these processing biases was not statistically significant.
These results point to a core cognitive difference in how people with these preoccupations view the world. “In individuals that have more body dysmorphic symptoms, this bias is even greater, indicating that there is an information processing bias underlying the symptomatic presentations of BDD,” Richards-Brown said.
Relying on an online sample from the general population introduces certain constraints. The participants completed a screening questionnaire that measures body dysmorphic tendencies, but they were not formally diagnosed with BDD by a clinician. Applying these findings directly to clinical settings requires testing patients who have received a formal psychiatric diagnosis.
The study also relied on an uneven ratio of male to female participants, primarily due to sampling constraints in the first experiment. Although the available data did not show sex differences in how people processed self-related information, recruiting a more balanced sample in the future would help confirm that these cognitive patterns operate similarly across all demographics.
Future research might explore how these cognitive biases change during therapeutic interventions. Tracking whether the exaggerated self-prioritization effect diminishes as BDD symptoms improve could offer a new way to measure treatment progress. Adapting these simple computer tasks into training exercises might also help individuals practice directing their attention away from the self, offering a potential supplemental treatment for body image distress.
The study, “Exaggerated Self-Referencing in Body Dysmorphic Disorder,” was authored by M. Richards-Brown, S. Castiello de Obeso, R. Dennison, and R. A. Murphy.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BodyDysmorphia #SelfPrioritization #BDDSymptoms #SelfReferencing #CognitiveBias #MentalHealthResearch #BodyImageDisturbance #SelfProcessing #PsychologyStudy #BDDTreatmentPotential
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DATE: August 3, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Body dysmorphia is linked to an exaggerated cognitive bias for self-related information
People with body dysmorphic tendencies learn and process self-related information more strongly than information about other people, according to new research. This exaggerated focus on the self extends even to neutral, everyday objects that have nothing to do with physical appearance. The findings, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, provide evidence that a basic bias in how the brain processes self-relevant information might contribute to severe body image preoccupations.
Body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, is a mental health condition characterized by an intense and distressing preoccupation with perceived flaws in physical appearance. Individuals with BDD often spend hours each day focusing on minor or imagined physical anomalies. This behavior tends to severely disrupt their daily lives, relationships, and social functioning.
“We were motivated to understand what underlying information-processing mechanisms may be contributing to the observed symptomatology of body dysmorphic disorder,” said Maria Richards-Brown, a researcher in the Department of Psychosis Studies at King’s College London. “Through understanding where information processing may differ as one exhibits more body dysmorphic symptoms, we can hopefully identify clinical treatment targets.”
To understand how this intense preoccupation develops, psychologists look at how the brain manages and assigns importance to different types of information. In the general population, people naturally display a “self-prioritization effect.”
“In the general population, individuals show a greater prioritization of processing information about themselves, compared to information about their best friend or a stranger,” Richards-Brown explained. “This is a well-known information processing bias.”
This psychological concept suggests that individuals process, learn, and recall information associated with themselves much faster and more accurately than information associated with other people. For example, if a person is asked to associate a random object with themselves and another object with a stranger, they will consistently recognize the self-associated object with greater ease.
Previous models suggest that BDD might emerge from a hyperactive self-attention network in the brain. This heightened internal focus could cause a person to pay excessive attention to self-related cues, magnifying normal bodily signals into intense preoccupations.
The authors of the current paper designed their research to test whether people with higher levels of body dysmorphic symptoms show an inflated version of this standard self-prioritization effect. They wanted to determine if this bias exists even when the information being processed has no connection to physical appearance.
In the first experiment, the scientists recruited 87 female participants through an online platform. The participants ranged in age from 32 to 71 years old. They completed a standard questionnaire used to screen for the presence and severity of BDD symptoms.
Next, participants completed an associative learning task. The researchers asked them to learn specific pairings between three geometric shapes (a triangle, a circle, and a square) and three personal labels (“You,” the first name of their best friend, and “Stranger”). After a brief learning period, the participants viewed a series of shape and label combinations on a screen.
For each trial, participants had a brief window to press a specific keyboard key to indicate whether the pairing on the screen matched the original associations they had learned, or if it was a mismatch. For instance, if they originally learned that a square represented “You,” they might later see a square paired with the word “Stranger,” which would be an incorrect mismatch.
Across the board, participants demonstrated the standard self-prioritization effect. They were more accurate and faster at correctly identifying matches involving the “You” label compared to the “Friend” or “Stranger” labels.
When factoring in the questionnaire scores, the authors found a specific pattern related to body image concerns. Participants with higher BDD symptom scores were more accurate at identifying the self-related pairings compared to the stranger-related pairings. This gap in accuracy between the self and the stranger was wider for those with higher body dysmorphic tendencies than for those with lower scores.
To confirm and expand upon these initial observations, the scientists conducted a second experiment with a new sample. This group included 173 participants, consisting of 135 females and 41 males ranging from 19 to 71 years old. The procedures were largely the same, but the researchers made the matching task slightly more difficult by flashing the shape-label pairings on the screen for a much shorter duration of 250 milliseconds.
In this second experiment, the researchers also administered two additional questionnaires. One measured symptoms of depression, and the other measured general impulsivity. They included these extra measures to control for the possibility that depression or impulsivity might account for any differences in learning speed or accuracy, rather than BDD symptoms.
The second experiment confirmed the exaggerated self-prioritization effect in individuals with higher body dysmorphic scores. In this iteration, participants with elevated BDD symptoms showed greater accuracy in identifying “You” matches compared to “Friend” matches. The reaction time data also revealed a tailored self-bias.
Participants with more BDD symptoms were disproportionately faster at identifying self-related pairings compared to both friend- and stranger-related pairings. The additional questionnaires provided helpful context for these outcomes. The researchers found that the influence of depression and impulsivity on these processing biases was not statistically significant.
These results point to a core cognitive difference in how people with these preoccupations view the world. “In individuals that have more body dysmorphic symptoms, this bias is even greater, indicating that there is an information processing bias underlying the symptomatic presentations of BDD,” Richards-Brown said.
Relying on an online sample from the general population introduces certain constraints. The participants completed a screening questionnaire that measures body dysmorphic tendencies, but they were not formally diagnosed with BDD by a clinician. Applying these findings directly to clinical settings requires testing patients who have received a formal psychiatric diagnosis.
The study also relied on an uneven ratio of male to female participants, primarily due to sampling constraints in the first experiment. Although the available data did not show sex differences in how people processed self-related information, recruiting a more balanced sample in the future would help confirm that these cognitive patterns operate similarly across all demographics.
Future research might explore how these cognitive biases change during therapeutic interventions. Tracking whether the exaggerated self-prioritization effect diminishes as BDD symptoms improve could offer a new way to measure treatment progress. Adapting these simple computer tasks into training exercises might also help individuals practice directing their attention away from the self, offering a potential supplemental treatment for body image distress.
The study, “Exaggerated Self-Referencing in Body Dysmorphic Disorder,” was authored by M. Richards-Brown, S. Castiello de Obeso, R. Dennison, and R. A. Murphy.
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BodyDysmorphia #SelfPrioritization #BDDSymptoms #SelfReferencing #CognitiveBias #MentalHealthResearch #BodyImageDisturbance #SelfProcessing #PsychologyStudy #BDDTreatmentPotential
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DATE: August 3, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Body dysmorphia is linked to an exaggerated cognitive bias for self-related information
People with body dysmorphic tendencies learn and process self-related information more strongly than information about other people, according to new research. This exaggerated focus on the self extends even to neutral, everyday objects that have nothing to do with physical appearance. The findings, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, provide evidence that a basic bias in how the brain processes self-relevant information might contribute to severe body image preoccupations.
Body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, is a mental health condition characterized by an intense and distressing preoccupation with perceived flaws in physical appearance. Individuals with BDD often spend hours each day focusing on minor or imagined physical anomalies. This behavior tends to severely disrupt their daily lives, relationships, and social functioning.
“We were motivated to understand what underlying information-processing mechanisms may be contributing to the observed symptomatology of body dysmorphic disorder,” said Maria Richards-Brown, a researcher in the Department of Psychosis Studies at King’s College London. “Through understanding where information processing may differ as one exhibits more body dysmorphic symptoms, we can hopefully identify clinical treatment targets.”
To understand how this intense preoccupation develops, psychologists look at how the brain manages and assigns importance to different types of information. In the general population, people naturally display a “self-prioritization effect.”
“In the general population, individuals show a greater prioritization of processing information about themselves, compared to information about their best friend or a stranger,” Richards-Brown explained. “This is a well-known information processing bias.”
This psychological concept suggests that individuals process, learn, and recall information associated with themselves much faster and more accurately than information associated with other people. For example, if a person is asked to associate a random object with themselves and another object with a stranger, they will consistently recognize the self-associated object with greater ease.
Previous models suggest that BDD might emerge from a hyperactive self-attention network in the brain. This heightened internal focus could cause a person to pay excessive attention to self-related cues, magnifying normal bodily signals into intense preoccupations.
The authors of the current paper designed their research to test whether people with higher levels of body dysmorphic symptoms show an inflated version of this standard self-prioritization effect. They wanted to determine if this bias exists even when the information being processed has no connection to physical appearance.
In the first experiment, the scientists recruited 87 female participants through an online platform. The participants ranged in age from 32 to 71 years old. They completed a standard questionnaire used to screen for the presence and severity of BDD symptoms.
Next, participants completed an associative learning task. The researchers asked them to learn specific pairings between three geometric shapes (a triangle, a circle, and a square) and three personal labels (“You,” the first name of their best friend, and “Stranger”). After a brief learning period, the participants viewed a series of shape and label combinations on a screen.
For each trial, participants had a brief window to press a specific keyboard key to indicate whether the pairing on the screen matched the original associations they had learned, or if it was a mismatch. For instance, if they originally learned that a square represented “You,” they might later see a square paired with the word “Stranger,” which would be an incorrect mismatch.
Across the board, participants demonstrated the standard self-prioritization effect. They were more accurate and faster at correctly identifying matches involving the “You” label compared to the “Friend” or “Stranger” labels.
When factoring in the questionnaire scores, the authors found a specific pattern related to body image concerns. Participants with higher BDD symptom scores were more accurate at identifying the self-related pairings compared to the stranger-related pairings. This gap in accuracy between the self and the stranger was wider for those with higher body dysmorphic tendencies than for those with lower scores.
To confirm and expand upon these initial observations, the scientists conducted a second experiment with a new sample. This group included 173 participants, consisting of 135 females and 41 males ranging from 19 to 71 years old. The procedures were largely the same, but the researchers made the matching task slightly more difficult by flashing the shape-label pairings on the screen for a much shorter duration of 250 milliseconds.
In this second experiment, the researchers also administered two additional questionnaires. One measured symptoms of depression, and the other measured general impulsivity. They included these extra measures to control for the possibility that depression or impulsivity might account for any differences in learning speed or accuracy, rather than BDD symptoms.
The second experiment confirmed the exaggerated self-prioritization effect in individuals with higher body dysmorphic scores. In this iteration, participants with elevated BDD symptoms showed greater accuracy in identifying “You” matches compared to “Friend” matches. The reaction time data also revealed a tailored self-bias.
Participants with more BDD symptoms were disproportionately faster at identifying self-related pairings compared to both friend- and stranger-related pairings. The additional questionnaires provided helpful context for these outcomes. The researchers found that the influence of depression and impulsivity on these processing biases was not statistically significant.
These results point to a core cognitive difference in how people with these preoccupations view the world. “In individuals that have more body dysmorphic symptoms, this bias is even greater, indicating that there is an information processing bias underlying the symptomatic presentations of BDD,” Richards-Brown said.
Relying on an online sample from the general population introduces certain constraints. The participants completed a screening questionnaire that measures body dysmorphic tendencies, but they were not formally diagnosed with BDD by a clinician. Applying these findings directly to clinical settings requires testing patients who have received a formal psychiatric diagnosis.
The study also relied on an uneven ratio of male to female participants, primarily due to sampling constraints in the first experiment. Although the available data did not show sex differences in how people processed self-related information, recruiting a more balanced sample in the future would help confirm that these cognitive patterns operate similarly across all demographics.
Future research might explore how these cognitive biases change during therapeutic interventions. Tracking whether the exaggerated self-prioritization effect diminishes as BDD symptoms improve could offer a new way to measure treatment progress. Adapting these simple computer tasks into training exercises might also help individuals practice directing their attention away from the self, offering a potential supplemental treatment for body image distress.
The study, “Exaggerated Self-Referencing in Body Dysmorphic Disorder,” was authored by M. Richards-Brown, S. Castiello de Obeso, R. Dennison, and R. A. Murphy.
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BodyDysmorphia #SelfPrioritization #BDDSymptoms #SelfReferencing #CognitiveBias #MentalHealthResearch #BodyImageDisturbance #SelfProcessing #PsychologyStudy #BDDTreatmentPotential
-
The Rosenhan Experiment: How Eight Ordinary People Exposed Flaws in Psychiatry |
The 1973 Rosenhan Experiment: How eight healthy people entered psychiatric hospitals and changed mental health care forever. Picture…
#NewsBeep #News #Mentalhealth #AU #Australia #diagnosticerrors #Health #MentalHealth #Psychiatrichospitals #psychologystudy #RosenhanExperiment
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/839698/ -
The Rosenhan Experiment: How Eight Ordinary People Exposed Flaws in Psychiatry |
The 1973 Rosenhan Experiment: How eight healthy people entered psychiatric hospitals and changed mental health care forever. Picture…
#NewsBeep #News #Mentalhealth #AU #Australia #diagnosticerrors #Health #MentalHealth #Psychiatrichospitals #psychologystudy #RosenhanExperiment
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/839698/ -
https://www.europesays.com/uk/1125808/ The Rosenhan Experiment: How Eight Ordinary People Exposed Flaws in Psychiatry | #DiagnosticErrors #Health #MentalHealth #PsychiatricHospitals #PsychologyStudy #RosenhanExperiment #UK #UnitedKingdom
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DATE: August 1, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Horror soundtracks can make friendly smiles feel eerie and threatening, study finds
A new study published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that scary music can subtly alter how people interpret human facial expressions, making even smiling faces seem somewhat threatening. By measuring both subjective ratings and involuntary eye responses, scientists observed that ominous soundtracks biased participants toward perceiving greater danger in human faces. These findings demonstrate how background auditory cues might unconsciously shape everyday social evaluations and media interpretation.
Human interaction relies heavily on reading facial expressions to evaluate whether someone poses a threat or offers safety. Background sounds often establish an emotional context that influences how subsequent information is processed, a phenomenon known as affective priming. When an initial stimulus carries a strong emotional tone, it tends to frame how a person interprets visual cues that follow shortly after.
Horror film soundtracks are constructed to evoke anxiety through rapid volume changes, jarring pitches, and acoustic patterns that mimic human cries. These fear-inducing sounds tend to trigger subcortical brain regions that monitor the environment for danger. The authors conducted this research to explore whether auditory fear cues alter subjective perceptions of social threat, and whether these changes are accompanied by physiological markers of arousal.
Shumetha Sidhu, a lecturer in psychology and director of postgraduate research studies at the University of Reading Malaysia, explained what led her team to pursue this topic. “It has always been fascinating to me how preconceived notions or other cognitive factors can influence perception, and this study came about because my students were interested in emotional face perception research too,” Sidhu told PsyPost. “A bit of literature reviewing showed this was an underexplored area, and we decided to run with it using the angle of threat perception as it seems highly relevant to a lot of people.”
To test this possibility, the researchers recruited 45 university students in Malaysia, aged 18 to 25, with an average age of approximately 21 years. The participant group was predominantly female, including 42 females and three males, with a multiethnic background comprising Chinese, Malay, Indian, and other ethnicities. Participants sat 60 centimeters away from an eye-tracking screen while wearing over-ear headphones fixed at a set volume.
The study used a within-subjects experimental design, meaning every participant experienced all combinations of sounds and facial expressions. The researchers controlled for environmental influences by maintaining constant overhead lighting and using a fixed monitor display. In each trial, participants listened to a 15-second audio clip followed immediately by a photograph of a face displayed for one second.
The auditory clips featured either a fear-inducing track from the film *Insidious* or neutral white noise as a control baseline. The visual stimuli consisted of 90 photographs depicting young adult Chinese models showing angry, neutral, or happy expressions. Participants completed 90 randomized trials in total, split across three separate testing blocks to minimize fatigue.
After viewing each face, participants rated how threatening the image appeared on a continuous scale from 0, indicating not at all threatening, to 100, indicating extremely threatening. To hide the true intent of the experiment, participants also rated how exciting and relaxing the faces appeared. Physiological response was measured using pupillometry, a technique that tracks changes in pupil diameter to index autonomic nervous system activity and heightened attention.
For the threat rating analysis, data from three participants were excluded as statistical outliers, leaving a sample of 42 individuals. Exposure to scary music led to a notable overall shift in perceived threat across all facial expressions. The average threat rating across all face types rose from 18.90 points out of 100 during white noise to 41.65 points during scary music, representing an absolute increase of 22.75 points and more than doubling the baseline score.
Angry faces received the highest threat scores in both conditions, moving from 34.92 points under white noise to 52.93 points under scary music. Neutral faces saw an increase from a baseline of 14.18 points with white noise up to 39.62 points with scary music. Happy faces, which averaged a low threat rating of 7.58 points following white noise, rose to 32.41 points when paired with scary music.
The reaction to smiling faces proved particularly unexpected for the research team. “We didn’t expect that fear-inducing music would increase threat perception towards happy faces!” Sidhu noted.
During the neutral white noise condition, a distinct hierarchy emerged where angry faces were judged as most threatening, followed by neutral faces, and finally happy faces. When scary music was played, angry faces remained the highest in threat, but the difference between neutral faces and happy faces was no longer statistically significant. This outcome suggests that fear-inducing audio may blur the boundary between emotionally neutral signals and friendly expressions.
Pupillometry data were analyzed for all 45 participants, as no outliers were present in the eye-tracking measurements. The main difference in average pupil diameter between the scary music condition (2.94 millimeters) and the white noise condition (2.93 millimeters) was not statistically significant. This indicates that scary music did not produce a widespread, uniform enlargement of pupil size across all facial expressions.
The scientists observed a specific interaction between music type and facial expression regarding pupil size. When participants viewed neutral faces after listening to scary music, their average pupil diameter expanded to 2.94 millimeters compared to 2.91 millimeters after white noise. In contrast, pupil size changes for angry faces (2.95 millimeters under both sounds) and happy faces (2.93 millimeters with white noise versus 2.92 millimeters with scary music) were not statistically significant across sound conditions.
Regarding the broader message of these outcomes, Sidhu emphasized how external environments shape social processing. The primary takeaway, she explained, is “that fear-inducing music can influence perception of not just negative and neutral emotions, but also positive ones (happy faces). It highlights the importance of contextual cues when processing information so as not to be easily biased.”
The findings do not suggest that scary music induces full-blown panic or causes people to view ordinary faces as severe physical threats. The threat ratings for smiling faces paired with scary music averaged approximately 32 on a 100-point scale, indicating mild unease or ambiguity rather than extreme terror. The auditory priming effect appears to introduce a subtle interpretive bias rather than a total distortion of reality.
The authors also pointed out that readers should consider the specific demographics of the study when evaluating the results. “We have a predominantly female sample, so I will not overly generalize these findings,” Sidhu stated. “Likewise, we used a South East Asian sample, so no guarantee that it generalizes to other demographics.”
Moving forward, the research team aims to explore why positive expressions become eerie under scary audio conditions. “The unexpected finding we had was that people perceived happy faces as more threatening when exposed to the fear-inducing music,” Sidhu said. “One interpretation for this could be that a smile coupled with that type of soundtrack was conveying sinister intent. We plan on investigating this a bit further down the line.”
Future work could also examine whether music-induced changes in facial threat perception spill over into real-world choices and social behaviors. Scientists could explore this question by pairing different musical backgrounds with faces during economic trust games to observe whether ominous sounds alter financial decisions or social cooperation.
The study, “The Sound of Fear: How Horror Soundtracks Shape Threat Perception of Emotional Faces,” was authored by Li Fun Lua, Xuan Nee Kong, Jasmine K. W. Lee, and Shumetha Kaur Sidhu.
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HorrorSoundtracks #ThreatPerception #AffectivePriming #Pupillometry #EmotionalFaces #FearMusic #FacePerception #PsychologyStudy #AuditoryCues #SocialCognition
-
DATE: August 1, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Horror soundtracks can make friendly smiles feel eerie and threatening, study finds
A new study published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that scary music can subtly alter how people interpret human facial expressions, making even smiling faces seem somewhat threatening. By measuring both subjective ratings and involuntary eye responses, scientists observed that ominous soundtracks biased participants toward perceiving greater danger in human faces. These findings demonstrate how background auditory cues might unconsciously shape everyday social evaluations and media interpretation.
Human interaction relies heavily on reading facial expressions to evaluate whether someone poses a threat or offers safety. Background sounds often establish an emotional context that influences how subsequent information is processed, a phenomenon known as affective priming. When an initial stimulus carries a strong emotional tone, it tends to frame how a person interprets visual cues that follow shortly after.
Horror film soundtracks are constructed to evoke anxiety through rapid volume changes, jarring pitches, and acoustic patterns that mimic human cries. These fear-inducing sounds tend to trigger subcortical brain regions that monitor the environment for danger. The authors conducted this research to explore whether auditory fear cues alter subjective perceptions of social threat, and whether these changes are accompanied by physiological markers of arousal.
Shumetha Sidhu, a lecturer in psychology and director of postgraduate research studies at the University of Reading Malaysia, explained what led her team to pursue this topic. “It has always been fascinating to me how preconceived notions or other cognitive factors can influence perception, and this study came about because my students were interested in emotional face perception research too,” Sidhu told PsyPost. “A bit of literature reviewing showed this was an underexplored area, and we decided to run with it using the angle of threat perception as it seems highly relevant to a lot of people.”
To test this possibility, the researchers recruited 45 university students in Malaysia, aged 18 to 25, with an average age of approximately 21 years. The participant group was predominantly female, including 42 females and three males, with a multiethnic background comprising Chinese, Malay, Indian, and other ethnicities. Participants sat 60 centimeters away from an eye-tracking screen while wearing over-ear headphones fixed at a set volume.
The study used a within-subjects experimental design, meaning every participant experienced all combinations of sounds and facial expressions. The researchers controlled for environmental influences by maintaining constant overhead lighting and using a fixed monitor display. In each trial, participants listened to a 15-second audio clip followed immediately by a photograph of a face displayed for one second.
The auditory clips featured either a fear-inducing track from the film *Insidious* or neutral white noise as a control baseline. The visual stimuli consisted of 90 photographs depicting young adult Chinese models showing angry, neutral, or happy expressions. Participants completed 90 randomized trials in total, split across three separate testing blocks to minimize fatigue.
After viewing each face, participants rated how threatening the image appeared on a continuous scale from 0, indicating not at all threatening, to 100, indicating extremely threatening. To hide the true intent of the experiment, participants also rated how exciting and relaxing the faces appeared. Physiological response was measured using pupillometry, a technique that tracks changes in pupil diameter to index autonomic nervous system activity and heightened attention.
For the threat rating analysis, data from three participants were excluded as statistical outliers, leaving a sample of 42 individuals. Exposure to scary music led to a notable overall shift in perceived threat across all facial expressions. The average threat rating across all face types rose from 18.90 points out of 100 during white noise to 41.65 points during scary music, representing an absolute increase of 22.75 points and more than doubling the baseline score.
Angry faces received the highest threat scores in both conditions, moving from 34.92 points under white noise to 52.93 points under scary music. Neutral faces saw an increase from a baseline of 14.18 points with white noise up to 39.62 points with scary music. Happy faces, which averaged a low threat rating of 7.58 points following white noise, rose to 32.41 points when paired with scary music.
The reaction to smiling faces proved particularly unexpected for the research team. “We didn’t expect that fear-inducing music would increase threat perception towards happy faces!” Sidhu noted.
During the neutral white noise condition, a distinct hierarchy emerged where angry faces were judged as most threatening, followed by neutral faces, and finally happy faces. When scary music was played, angry faces remained the highest in threat, but the difference between neutral faces and happy faces was no longer statistically significant. This outcome suggests that fear-inducing audio may blur the boundary between emotionally neutral signals and friendly expressions.
Pupillometry data were analyzed for all 45 participants, as no outliers were present in the eye-tracking measurements. The main difference in average pupil diameter between the scary music condition (2.94 millimeters) and the white noise condition (2.93 millimeters) was not statistically significant. This indicates that scary music did not produce a widespread, uniform enlargement of pupil size across all facial expressions.
The scientists observed a specific interaction between music type and facial expression regarding pupil size. When participants viewed neutral faces after listening to scary music, their average pupil diameter expanded to 2.94 millimeters compared to 2.91 millimeters after white noise. In contrast, pupil size changes for angry faces (2.95 millimeters under both sounds) and happy faces (2.93 millimeters with white noise versus 2.92 millimeters with scary music) were not statistically significant across sound conditions.
Regarding the broader message of these outcomes, Sidhu emphasized how external environments shape social processing. The primary takeaway, she explained, is “that fear-inducing music can influence perception of not just negative and neutral emotions, but also positive ones (happy faces). It highlights the importance of contextual cues when processing information so as not to be easily biased.”
The findings do not suggest that scary music induces full-blown panic or causes people to view ordinary faces as severe physical threats. The threat ratings for smiling faces paired with scary music averaged approximately 32 on a 100-point scale, indicating mild unease or ambiguity rather than extreme terror. The auditory priming effect appears to introduce a subtle interpretive bias rather than a total distortion of reality.
The authors also pointed out that readers should consider the specific demographics of the study when evaluating the results. “We have a predominantly female sample, so I will not overly generalize these findings,” Sidhu stated. “Likewise, we used a South East Asian sample, so no guarantee that it generalizes to other demographics.”
Moving forward, the research team aims to explore why positive expressions become eerie under scary audio conditions. “The unexpected finding we had was that people perceived happy faces as more threatening when exposed to the fear-inducing music,” Sidhu said. “One interpretation for this could be that a smile coupled with that type of soundtrack was conveying sinister intent. We plan on investigating this a bit further down the line.”
Future work could also examine whether music-induced changes in facial threat perception spill over into real-world choices and social behaviors. Scientists could explore this question by pairing different musical backgrounds with faces during economic trust games to observe whether ominous sounds alter financial decisions or social cooperation.
The study, “The Sound of Fear: How Horror Soundtracks Shape Threat Perception of Emotional Faces,” was authored by Li Fun Lua, Xuan Nee Kong, Jasmine K. W. Lee, and Shumetha Kaur Sidhu.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HorrorSoundtracks #ThreatPerception #AffectivePriming #Pupillometry #EmotionalFaces #FearMusic #FacePerception #PsychologyStudy #AuditoryCues #SocialCognition
-
DATE: August 1, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Horror soundtracks can make friendly smiles feel eerie and threatening, study finds
A new study published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that scary music can subtly alter how people interpret human facial expressions, making even smiling faces seem somewhat threatening. By measuring both subjective ratings and involuntary eye responses, scientists observed that ominous soundtracks biased participants toward perceiving greater danger in human faces. These findings demonstrate how background auditory cues might unconsciously shape everyday social evaluations and media interpretation.
Human interaction relies heavily on reading facial expressions to evaluate whether someone poses a threat or offers safety. Background sounds often establish an emotional context that influences how subsequent information is processed, a phenomenon known as affective priming. When an initial stimulus carries a strong emotional tone, it tends to frame how a person interprets visual cues that follow shortly after.
Horror film soundtracks are constructed to evoke anxiety through rapid volume changes, jarring pitches, and acoustic patterns that mimic human cries. These fear-inducing sounds tend to trigger subcortical brain regions that monitor the environment for danger. The authors conducted this research to explore whether auditory fear cues alter subjective perceptions of social threat, and whether these changes are accompanied by physiological markers of arousal.
Shumetha Sidhu, a lecturer in psychology and director of postgraduate research studies at the University of Reading Malaysia, explained what led her team to pursue this topic. “It has always been fascinating to me how preconceived notions or other cognitive factors can influence perception, and this study came about because my students were interested in emotional face perception research too,” Sidhu told PsyPost. “A bit of literature reviewing showed this was an underexplored area, and we decided to run with it using the angle of threat perception as it seems highly relevant to a lot of people.”
To test this possibility, the researchers recruited 45 university students in Malaysia, aged 18 to 25, with an average age of approximately 21 years. The participant group was predominantly female, including 42 females and three males, with a multiethnic background comprising Chinese, Malay, Indian, and other ethnicities. Participants sat 60 centimeters away from an eye-tracking screen while wearing over-ear headphones fixed at a set volume.
The study used a within-subjects experimental design, meaning every participant experienced all combinations of sounds and facial expressions. The researchers controlled for environmental influences by maintaining constant overhead lighting and using a fixed monitor display. In each trial, participants listened to a 15-second audio clip followed immediately by a photograph of a face displayed for one second.
The auditory clips featured either a fear-inducing track from the film *Insidious* or neutral white noise as a control baseline. The visual stimuli consisted of 90 photographs depicting young adult Chinese models showing angry, neutral, or happy expressions. Participants completed 90 randomized trials in total, split across three separate testing blocks to minimize fatigue.
After viewing each face, participants rated how threatening the image appeared on a continuous scale from 0, indicating not at all threatening, to 100, indicating extremely threatening. To hide the true intent of the experiment, participants also rated how exciting and relaxing the faces appeared. Physiological response was measured using pupillometry, a technique that tracks changes in pupil diameter to index autonomic nervous system activity and heightened attention.
For the threat rating analysis, data from three participants were excluded as statistical outliers, leaving a sample of 42 individuals. Exposure to scary music led to a notable overall shift in perceived threat across all facial expressions. The average threat rating across all face types rose from 18.90 points out of 100 during white noise to 41.65 points during scary music, representing an absolute increase of 22.75 points and more than doubling the baseline score.
Angry faces received the highest threat scores in both conditions, moving from 34.92 points under white noise to 52.93 points under scary music. Neutral faces saw an increase from a baseline of 14.18 points with white noise up to 39.62 points with scary music. Happy faces, which averaged a low threat rating of 7.58 points following white noise, rose to 32.41 points when paired with scary music.
The reaction to smiling faces proved particularly unexpected for the research team. “We didn’t expect that fear-inducing music would increase threat perception towards happy faces!” Sidhu noted.
During the neutral white noise condition, a distinct hierarchy emerged where angry faces were judged as most threatening, followed by neutral faces, and finally happy faces. When scary music was played, angry faces remained the highest in threat, but the difference between neutral faces and happy faces was no longer statistically significant. This outcome suggests that fear-inducing audio may blur the boundary between emotionally neutral signals and friendly expressions.
Pupillometry data were analyzed for all 45 participants, as no outliers were present in the eye-tracking measurements. The main difference in average pupil diameter between the scary music condition (2.94 millimeters) and the white noise condition (2.93 millimeters) was not statistically significant. This indicates that scary music did not produce a widespread, uniform enlargement of pupil size across all facial expressions.
The scientists observed a specific interaction between music type and facial expression regarding pupil size. When participants viewed neutral faces after listening to scary music, their average pupil diameter expanded to 2.94 millimeters compared to 2.91 millimeters after white noise. In contrast, pupil size changes for angry faces (2.95 millimeters under both sounds) and happy faces (2.93 millimeters with white noise versus 2.92 millimeters with scary music) were not statistically significant across sound conditions.
Regarding the broader message of these outcomes, Sidhu emphasized how external environments shape social processing. The primary takeaway, she explained, is “that fear-inducing music can influence perception of not just negative and neutral emotions, but also positive ones (happy faces). It highlights the importance of contextual cues when processing information so as not to be easily biased.”
The findings do not suggest that scary music induces full-blown panic or causes people to view ordinary faces as severe physical threats. The threat ratings for smiling faces paired with scary music averaged approximately 32 on a 100-point scale, indicating mild unease or ambiguity rather than extreme terror. The auditory priming effect appears to introduce a subtle interpretive bias rather than a total distortion of reality.
The authors also pointed out that readers should consider the specific demographics of the study when evaluating the results. “We have a predominantly female sample, so I will not overly generalize these findings,” Sidhu stated. “Likewise, we used a South East Asian sample, so no guarantee that it generalizes to other demographics.”
Moving forward, the research team aims to explore why positive expressions become eerie under scary audio conditions. “The unexpected finding we had was that people perceived happy faces as more threatening when exposed to the fear-inducing music,” Sidhu said. “One interpretation for this could be that a smile coupled with that type of soundtrack was conveying sinister intent. We plan on investigating this a bit further down the line.”
Future work could also examine whether music-induced changes in facial threat perception spill over into real-world choices and social behaviors. Scientists could explore this question by pairing different musical backgrounds with faces during economic trust games to observe whether ominous sounds alter financial decisions or social cooperation.
The study, “The Sound of Fear: How Horror Soundtracks Shape Threat Perception of Emotional Faces,” was authored by Li Fun Lua, Xuan Nee Kong, Jasmine K. W. Lee, and Shumetha Kaur Sidhu.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HorrorSoundtracks #ThreatPerception #AffectivePriming #Pupillometry #EmotionalFaces #FearMusic #FacePerception #PsychologyStudy #AuditoryCues #SocialCognition
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DATE: July 17, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New psychology research reveals the insidious nature of bullshit
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
A recent study published in Current Psychology suggests that people are more likely to believe false information when it comes from someone who ignores the truth rather than a liar who actively tries to deceive. The research indicates that repeating statements made by someone indifferent to facts heavily increases how truthful those statements feel to readers. These findings provide evidence that casual disregard for reality poses a uniquely potent threat to public knowledge and belief.
The digital age makes tracking misinformation increasingly difficult. Information often spreads not just through intentional deception, but through a behavior known in psychology as bullshitting. In academic terms, a liar is someone who knows the truth and intentionally tries to mislead an audience. A bullshitter, on the other hand, communicates with little to no regard for the truth, evidence, or established facts.
A statement made by a bullshitter might happen to be true, or it might be false. The defining characteristic is the speaker’s total indifference to reality. Because bullshitters do not actively try to hide a specific truth, people often judge them less harshly than they judge outright liars.
John V. Petrocelli, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University and author of the book The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, wanted to test the real-world impact of this behavior. He noted that philosopher Harry Frankfurt proposed the insidious bullshit hypothesis in 1986. This idea suggests that society’s tolerance for bullshitting actually creates more long-term harm to public knowledge than lying.
Past research supports this distinction. In a 2023 study, Petrocelli and his colleagues explored how untrustworthy sources influence consumer attitudes over time. Participants read an advertisement for a fictitious gluten-free pizza and then learned the advertiser was either a known liar or a known bullshitter.
After a two-week delay, participants who had been warned about the bullshitter reported more positive attitudes toward the pizza than those warned about the liar. This demonstrated a “sleeper effect,” where the deceptive influence of the bullshitter actually grew stronger over time. The researchers also found that people possess a higher “dismissal readiness” for lies, meaning they find it easier to entirely reject a known lie than a statement of bullshit.
“We’d already found that people evaluate bullshitting less harshly than lying, consistent with Frankfurt’s (1986) essay,” Petrocelli explained. “But the harder question Frankfurt raised, and one almost nobody had tested empirically, was whether bullshit actually does more damage to what people believe, precisely because it doesn’t trigger the same skepticism a known lie does.”
To test this idea further, researchers examined how bullshitting interacts with the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe false information is correct simply after hearing it multiple times. When the human brain encounters a repeated statement, it processes that information more easily, and people often mistake this mental ease for actual truth.
Scientists wanted to see if knowing the source of a claim changes this effect. “The illusory truth effect literature gave me a clean, well-validated paradigm to test that consequence directly, rather than just people’s attitudes about bullshitting,” Petrocelli said. If a person knows a statement comes from a bullshitter rather than a liar, they might not filter the repeated information as strictly.
To investigate these dynamics, the authors designed a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, 204 undergraduate students evaluated 42 different statements. Half of these statements were factual, and half were completely false.
The participants were told the statements came from either an average person, a known liar, or a known bullshitter. The researchers provided specific definitions of a liar and a bullshitter to the participants to ensure they understood the difference. The students then rated how likely each statement was to be true on an 11-point scale.
The data showed that participants rated statements from an alleged bullshitter as more truthful than the exact same statements made by an alleged liar. The average person was trusted the most, but the bullshitter was trusted significantly more than the liar. This initial finding shows people naturally assign a higher likelihood of truth to bullshitting than they do to intentional lies.
The specific terms used to describe the sources were not the main driver of these results. “Just that the labels themselves turned out to matter less than we expected, it wasn’t simply that ‘bullshitter’ sounds better than ‘liar’,” Petrocelli said. “When we controlled for the base rate of false statements in Experiment 3 and gave very explicit, careful definitions of what the source’s instructions were, the effect held up.”
Petrocelli added that this consistency was reassuring. “That gives me more confidence this is really tracking something about how people process source-indifference to truth, not just a reaction to a loaded word,” he explained. The researchers then moved to test how this baseline trust interacts with repeated exposure in a second experiment.
In the second experiment, 293 students participated in a test of the illusory truth effect. The researchers exposed participants to 66 statements and asked them to rate how interesting they were. This served as an initial exposure phase, where some statements appeared once, and some appeared twice.
Before the final truth rating task, the authors separated the participants into different groups. One group was told the author of the statements was instructed to include some obvious lies. Another group was told the author was instructed to include statements with no regard for the truth.
The scientists also manipulated when the participants received a warning about the false information. Half the participants were warned before they read any statements during the initial phase. The other half read the statements first and were warned only before the final truth rating task.
During the final task, everyone rated the truthfulness of 88 statements on a six-point scale. These included a mix of entirely new claims and the repeated claims from the first phase. The researchers then compared how the different warnings affected the students’ beliefs.
The results revealed that forewarning people about falsity before they read the statements reduced the illusory truth effect across all groups. However, when the warning came after the initial exposure, a major difference emerged. Participants in the liar and control groups successfully corrected their judgments, recognizing the false statements as untrue.
In contrast, participants in the bullshitter group still fell for the illusory truth effect. Even after learning the author had no regard for the truth, these students rated the repeated false statements as highly truthful. The repetition of the bullshit claims successfully tricked their minds into believing the statements.
Petrocelli found this specific dynamic particularly intriguing. “The most striking pattern to me was that forewarning worked very differently depending on timing,” he said. “When people were warned before exposure that some information might be bullshit or lies, the illusory truth effect was largely neutralized across the board.”
The delayed warning produced an entirely different response. “But when people only learned after the fact that they’d been exposed to bullshit, the effect not only persisted for bullshit, it was the strongest condition in the whole design,” Petrocelli noted. Lies and honest control claims actually got corrected downward once people learned the truth after exposure.
“That asymmetry, corrective efforts working for lies but seemingly backfiring or simply not working for bullshit, was the clearest empirical signature of insidiousness we could have hoped for,” Petrocelli explained. To confirm these patterns, the researchers conducted a third experiment with 318 students. The setup was nearly identical to the second experiment, but with a strict condition to ensure the results were not just based on assumptions about lying frequencies.
They explicitly told participants that exactly half of the statements were false, lies, or bullshit, depending on the assigned group. This held the frequency of deception completely equal across all scenarios. The authors found the exact same pattern as the previous test, providing evidence that repeated exposure to truth-indifferent claims bypasses critical thinking.
These outcomes suggest that recognizing a source as a liar stops the brain from linking repetition to truth, but recognizing a source as a bullshitter fails to put up the same mental blockade. Petrocelli highlighted how this tendency leaves people vulnerable. “The instinct to relax your guard around someone who’s ‘just talking out of their hat’ rather than deliberately lying to you is exactly backwards,” he explained.
“A known liar’s claims get flagged and rejected; a bullshitter’s claims, because they’re not certainly false, slide by with much less resistance, and repetition alone makes them feel truer over time,” Petrocelli said. He suggested that people change how they evaluate everyday conversations. “If anything, the practical takeaway is: don’t just ask ‘is this person lying to me,’ ask ‘does this person actually know or care whether this is true,’ and treat repeated exposure to indifferent talk with at least as much scrutiny as you’d give a claim you know to be contested,” he recommended.
Recognizing the boundaries of this study helps place the findings into proper context. Petrocelli pointed out two main caveats regarding the research. “First, our operationalization is narrow: we tested one specific cognitive manifestation of insidiousness, the magnitude of the illusory truth effect under repetition, not Frankfurt’s full philosophical claim about bullshit’s corrosive effect on public discourse generally,” he explained.
The second limitation involves how the sources were presented to the participants. “Our manipulation relied on labeling someone a ‘bullshitter’ or ‘liar’ via source instructions, not on demonstrably truth-indifferent behavior itself,” Petrocelli noted. “So strictly speaking, these findings are about the effects of the label and its associated expectations, and future work really needs designs where bullshit is behaviorally instantiated rather than just described.”
Future investigations will likely focus on expanding these initial discoveries into more complex scenarios. The current research relied on neutral, trivia-style statements, but real-world misinformation often centers around highly emotional topics. “One is moving from neutral trivia statements to emotionally charged, real-world content, political claims, health misinformation, since motivated reasoning could plausibly amplify or dampen these effects,” Petrocelli said of his next steps.
He also plans to test whether the effect holds when people are not explicitly warned about a source’s intentions. “And longer-term, we want to push toward interventions, could platforms or media literacy programs actually teach people to detect truth-indifference specifically, as opposed to just teaching general fact-checking or lie-detection skills, which our work suggests may not transfer well to bullshit?” he added.
The study, “When fools have greater influence than liars: testing the insidious bullshit hypothesis with the illusory truth effect,” was authored by John V. Petrocelli, Elijah N. Rice, and Joseph M. Curran.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BullshitResearch #IllusoryTruthEffect #Misinformation #PublicKnowledge #SourceIndifference #TruthBias #MediaLiteracy #PsychologyStudy #FactChecking #DisinformationChallenges
-
DATE: July 17, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New psychology research reveals the insidious nature of bullshit
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
A recent study published in Current Psychology suggests that people are more likely to believe false information when it comes from someone who ignores the truth rather than a liar who actively tries to deceive. The research indicates that repeating statements made by someone indifferent to facts heavily increases how truthful those statements feel to readers. These findings provide evidence that casual disregard for reality poses a uniquely potent threat to public knowledge and belief.
The digital age makes tracking misinformation increasingly difficult. Information often spreads not just through intentional deception, but through a behavior known in psychology as bullshitting. In academic terms, a liar is someone who knows the truth and intentionally tries to mislead an audience. A bullshitter, on the other hand, communicates with little to no regard for the truth, evidence, or established facts.
A statement made by a bullshitter might happen to be true, or it might be false. The defining characteristic is the speaker’s total indifference to reality. Because bullshitters do not actively try to hide a specific truth, people often judge them less harshly than they judge outright liars.
John V. Petrocelli, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University and author of the book The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, wanted to test the real-world impact of this behavior. He noted that philosopher Harry Frankfurt proposed the insidious bullshit hypothesis in 1986. This idea suggests that society’s tolerance for bullshitting actually creates more long-term harm to public knowledge than lying.
Past research supports this distinction. In a 2023 study, Petrocelli and his colleagues explored how untrustworthy sources influence consumer attitudes over time. Participants read an advertisement for a fictitious gluten-free pizza and then learned the advertiser was either a known liar or a known bullshitter.
After a two-week delay, participants who had been warned about the bullshitter reported more positive attitudes toward the pizza than those warned about the liar. This demonstrated a “sleeper effect,” where the deceptive influence of the bullshitter actually grew stronger over time. The researchers also found that people possess a higher “dismissal readiness” for lies, meaning they find it easier to entirely reject a known lie than a statement of bullshit.
“We’d already found that people evaluate bullshitting less harshly than lying, consistent with Frankfurt’s (1986) essay,” Petrocelli explained. “But the harder question Frankfurt raised, and one almost nobody had tested empirically, was whether bullshit actually does more damage to what people believe, precisely because it doesn’t trigger the same skepticism a known lie does.”
To test this idea further, researchers examined how bullshitting interacts with the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe false information is correct simply after hearing it multiple times. When the human brain encounters a repeated statement, it processes that information more easily, and people often mistake this mental ease for actual truth.
Scientists wanted to see if knowing the source of a claim changes this effect. “The illusory truth effect literature gave me a clean, well-validated paradigm to test that consequence directly, rather than just people’s attitudes about bullshitting,” Petrocelli said. If a person knows a statement comes from a bullshitter rather than a liar, they might not filter the repeated information as strictly.
To investigate these dynamics, the authors designed a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, 204 undergraduate students evaluated 42 different statements. Half of these statements were factual, and half were completely false.
The participants were told the statements came from either an average person, a known liar, or a known bullshitter. The researchers provided specific definitions of a liar and a bullshitter to the participants to ensure they understood the difference. The students then rated how likely each statement was to be true on an 11-point scale.
The data showed that participants rated statements from an alleged bullshitter as more truthful than the exact same statements made by an alleged liar. The average person was trusted the most, but the bullshitter was trusted significantly more than the liar. This initial finding shows people naturally assign a higher likelihood of truth to bullshitting than they do to intentional lies.
The specific terms used to describe the sources were not the main driver of these results. “Just that the labels themselves turned out to matter less than we expected, it wasn’t simply that ‘bullshitter’ sounds better than ‘liar’,” Petrocelli said. “When we controlled for the base rate of false statements in Experiment 3 and gave very explicit, careful definitions of what the source’s instructions were, the effect held up.”
Petrocelli added that this consistency was reassuring. “That gives me more confidence this is really tracking something about how people process source-indifference to truth, not just a reaction to a loaded word,” he explained. The researchers then moved to test how this baseline trust interacts with repeated exposure in a second experiment.
In the second experiment, 293 students participated in a test of the illusory truth effect. The researchers exposed participants to 66 statements and asked them to rate how interesting they were. This served as an initial exposure phase, where some statements appeared once, and some appeared twice.
Before the final truth rating task, the authors separated the participants into different groups. One group was told the author of the statements was instructed to include some obvious lies. Another group was told the author was instructed to include statements with no regard for the truth.
The scientists also manipulated when the participants received a warning about the false information. Half the participants were warned before they read any statements during the initial phase. The other half read the statements first and were warned only before the final truth rating task.
During the final task, everyone rated the truthfulness of 88 statements on a six-point scale. These included a mix of entirely new claims and the repeated claims from the first phase. The researchers then compared how the different warnings affected the students’ beliefs.
The results revealed that forewarning people about falsity before they read the statements reduced the illusory truth effect across all groups. However, when the warning came after the initial exposure, a major difference emerged. Participants in the liar and control groups successfully corrected their judgments, recognizing the false statements as untrue.
In contrast, participants in the bullshitter group still fell for the illusory truth effect. Even after learning the author had no regard for the truth, these students rated the repeated false statements as highly truthful. The repetition of the bullshit claims successfully tricked their minds into believing the statements.
Petrocelli found this specific dynamic particularly intriguing. “The most striking pattern to me was that forewarning worked very differently depending on timing,” he said. “When people were warned before exposure that some information might be bullshit or lies, the illusory truth effect was largely neutralized across the board.”
The delayed warning produced an entirely different response. “But when people only learned after the fact that they’d been exposed to bullshit, the effect not only persisted for bullshit, it was the strongest condition in the whole design,” Petrocelli noted. Lies and honest control claims actually got corrected downward once people learned the truth after exposure.
“That asymmetry, corrective efforts working for lies but seemingly backfiring or simply not working for bullshit, was the clearest empirical signature of insidiousness we could have hoped for,” Petrocelli explained. To confirm these patterns, the researchers conducted a third experiment with 318 students. The setup was nearly identical to the second experiment, but with a strict condition to ensure the results were not just based on assumptions about lying frequencies.
They explicitly told participants that exactly half of the statements were false, lies, or bullshit, depending on the assigned group. This held the frequency of deception completely equal across all scenarios. The authors found the exact same pattern as the previous test, providing evidence that repeated exposure to truth-indifferent claims bypasses critical thinking.
These outcomes suggest that recognizing a source as a liar stops the brain from linking repetition to truth, but recognizing a source as a bullshitter fails to put up the same mental blockade. Petrocelli highlighted how this tendency leaves people vulnerable. “The instinct to relax your guard around someone who’s ‘just talking out of their hat’ rather than deliberately lying to you is exactly backwards,” he explained.
“A known liar’s claims get flagged and rejected; a bullshitter’s claims, because they’re not certainly false, slide by with much less resistance, and repetition alone makes them feel truer over time,” Petrocelli said. He suggested that people change how they evaluate everyday conversations. “If anything, the practical takeaway is: don’t just ask ‘is this person lying to me,’ ask ‘does this person actually know or care whether this is true,’ and treat repeated exposure to indifferent talk with at least as much scrutiny as you’d give a claim you know to be contested,” he recommended.
Recognizing the boundaries of this study helps place the findings into proper context. Petrocelli pointed out two main caveats regarding the research. “First, our operationalization is narrow: we tested one specific cognitive manifestation of insidiousness, the magnitude of the illusory truth effect under repetition, not Frankfurt’s full philosophical claim about bullshit’s corrosive effect on public discourse generally,” he explained.
The second limitation involves how the sources were presented to the participants. “Our manipulation relied on labeling someone a ‘bullshitter’ or ‘liar’ via source instructions, not on demonstrably truth-indifferent behavior itself,” Petrocelli noted. “So strictly speaking, these findings are about the effects of the label and its associated expectations, and future work really needs designs where bullshit is behaviorally instantiated rather than just described.”
Future investigations will likely focus on expanding these initial discoveries into more complex scenarios. The current research relied on neutral, trivia-style statements, but real-world misinformation often centers around highly emotional topics. “One is moving from neutral trivia statements to emotionally charged, real-world content, political claims, health misinformation, since motivated reasoning could plausibly amplify or dampen these effects,” Petrocelli said of his next steps.
He also plans to test whether the effect holds when people are not explicitly warned about a source’s intentions. “And longer-term, we want to push toward interventions, could platforms or media literacy programs actually teach people to detect truth-indifference specifically, as opposed to just teaching general fact-checking or lie-detection skills, which our work suggests may not transfer well to bullshit?” he added.
The study, “When fools have greater influence than liars: testing the insidious bullshit hypothesis with the illusory truth effect,” was authored by John V. Petrocelli, Elijah N. Rice, and Joseph M. Curran.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BullshitResearch #IllusoryTruthEffect #Misinformation #PublicKnowledge #SourceIndifference #TruthBias #MediaLiteracy #PsychologyStudy #FactChecking #DisinformationChallenges
-
DATE: July 17, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New psychology research reveals the insidious nature of bullshit
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
A recent study published in Current Psychology suggests that people are more likely to believe false information when it comes from someone who ignores the truth rather than a liar who actively tries to deceive. The research indicates that repeating statements made by someone indifferent to facts heavily increases how truthful those statements feel to readers. These findings provide evidence that casual disregard for reality poses a uniquely potent threat to public knowledge and belief.
The digital age makes tracking misinformation increasingly difficult. Information often spreads not just through intentional deception, but through a behavior known in psychology as bullshitting. In academic terms, a liar is someone who knows the truth and intentionally tries to mislead an audience. A bullshitter, on the other hand, communicates with little to no regard for the truth, evidence, or established facts.
A statement made by a bullshitter might happen to be true, or it might be false. The defining characteristic is the speaker’s total indifference to reality. Because bullshitters do not actively try to hide a specific truth, people often judge them less harshly than they judge outright liars.
John V. Petrocelli, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University and author of the book The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, wanted to test the real-world impact of this behavior. He noted that philosopher Harry Frankfurt proposed the insidious bullshit hypothesis in 1986. This idea suggests that society’s tolerance for bullshitting actually creates more long-term harm to public knowledge than lying.
Past research supports this distinction. In a 2023 study, Petrocelli and his colleagues explored how untrustworthy sources influence consumer attitudes over time. Participants read an advertisement for a fictitious gluten-free pizza and then learned the advertiser was either a known liar or a known bullshitter.
After a two-week delay, participants who had been warned about the bullshitter reported more positive attitudes toward the pizza than those warned about the liar. This demonstrated a “sleeper effect,” where the deceptive influence of the bullshitter actually grew stronger over time. The researchers also found that people possess a higher “dismissal readiness” for lies, meaning they find it easier to entirely reject a known lie than a statement of bullshit.
“We’d already found that people evaluate bullshitting less harshly than lying, consistent with Frankfurt’s (1986) essay,” Petrocelli explained. “But the harder question Frankfurt raised, and one almost nobody had tested empirically, was whether bullshit actually does more damage to what people believe, precisely because it doesn’t trigger the same skepticism a known lie does.”
To test this idea further, researchers examined how bullshitting interacts with the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe false information is correct simply after hearing it multiple times. When the human brain encounters a repeated statement, it processes that information more easily, and people often mistake this mental ease for actual truth.
Scientists wanted to see if knowing the source of a claim changes this effect. “The illusory truth effect literature gave me a clean, well-validated paradigm to test that consequence directly, rather than just people’s attitudes about bullshitting,” Petrocelli said. If a person knows a statement comes from a bullshitter rather than a liar, they might not filter the repeated information as strictly.
To investigate these dynamics, the authors designed a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, 204 undergraduate students evaluated 42 different statements. Half of these statements were factual, and half were completely false.
The participants were told the statements came from either an average person, a known liar, or a known bullshitter. The researchers provided specific definitions of a liar and a bullshitter to the participants to ensure they understood the difference. The students then rated how likely each statement was to be true on an 11-point scale.
The data showed that participants rated statements from an alleged bullshitter as more truthful than the exact same statements made by an alleged liar. The average person was trusted the most, but the bullshitter was trusted significantly more than the liar. This initial finding shows people naturally assign a higher likelihood of truth to bullshitting than they do to intentional lies.
The specific terms used to describe the sources were not the main driver of these results. “Just that the labels themselves turned out to matter less than we expected, it wasn’t simply that ‘bullshitter’ sounds better than ‘liar’,” Petrocelli said. “When we controlled for the base rate of false statements in Experiment 3 and gave very explicit, careful definitions of what the source’s instructions were, the effect held up.”
Petrocelli added that this consistency was reassuring. “That gives me more confidence this is really tracking something about how people process source-indifference to truth, not just a reaction to a loaded word,” he explained. The researchers then moved to test how this baseline trust interacts with repeated exposure in a second experiment.
In the second experiment, 293 students participated in a test of the illusory truth effect. The researchers exposed participants to 66 statements and asked them to rate how interesting they were. This served as an initial exposure phase, where some statements appeared once, and some appeared twice.
Before the final truth rating task, the authors separated the participants into different groups. One group was told the author of the statements was instructed to include some obvious lies. Another group was told the author was instructed to include statements with no regard for the truth.
The scientists also manipulated when the participants received a warning about the false information. Half the participants were warned before they read any statements during the initial phase. The other half read the statements first and were warned only before the final truth rating task.
During the final task, everyone rated the truthfulness of 88 statements on a six-point scale. These included a mix of entirely new claims and the repeated claims from the first phase. The researchers then compared how the different warnings affected the students’ beliefs.
The results revealed that forewarning people about falsity before they read the statements reduced the illusory truth effect across all groups. However, when the warning came after the initial exposure, a major difference emerged. Participants in the liar and control groups successfully corrected their judgments, recognizing the false statements as untrue.
In contrast, participants in the bullshitter group still fell for the illusory truth effect. Even after learning the author had no regard for the truth, these students rated the repeated false statements as highly truthful. The repetition of the bullshit claims successfully tricked their minds into believing the statements.
Petrocelli found this specific dynamic particularly intriguing. “The most striking pattern to me was that forewarning worked very differently depending on timing,” he said. “When people were warned before exposure that some information might be bullshit or lies, the illusory truth effect was largely neutralized across the board.”
The delayed warning produced an entirely different response. “But when people only learned after the fact that they’d been exposed to bullshit, the effect not only persisted for bullshit, it was the strongest condition in the whole design,” Petrocelli noted. Lies and honest control claims actually got corrected downward once people learned the truth after exposure.
“That asymmetry, corrective efforts working for lies but seemingly backfiring or simply not working for bullshit, was the clearest empirical signature of insidiousness we could have hoped for,” Petrocelli explained. To confirm these patterns, the researchers conducted a third experiment with 318 students. The setup was nearly identical to the second experiment, but with a strict condition to ensure the results were not just based on assumptions about lying frequencies.
They explicitly told participants that exactly half of the statements were false, lies, or bullshit, depending on the assigned group. This held the frequency of deception completely equal across all scenarios. The authors found the exact same pattern as the previous test, providing evidence that repeated exposure to truth-indifferent claims bypasses critical thinking.
These outcomes suggest that recognizing a source as a liar stops the brain from linking repetition to truth, but recognizing a source as a bullshitter fails to put up the same mental blockade. Petrocelli highlighted how this tendency leaves people vulnerable. “The instinct to relax your guard around someone who’s ‘just talking out of their hat’ rather than deliberately lying to you is exactly backwards,” he explained.
“A known liar’s claims get flagged and rejected; a bullshitter’s claims, because they’re not certainly false, slide by with much less resistance, and repetition alone makes them feel truer over time,” Petrocelli said. He suggested that people change how they evaluate everyday conversations. “If anything, the practical takeaway is: don’t just ask ‘is this person lying to me,’ ask ‘does this person actually know or care whether this is true,’ and treat repeated exposure to indifferent talk with at least as much scrutiny as you’d give a claim you know to be contested,” he recommended.
Recognizing the boundaries of this study helps place the findings into proper context. Petrocelli pointed out two main caveats regarding the research. “First, our operationalization is narrow: we tested one specific cognitive manifestation of insidiousness, the magnitude of the illusory truth effect under repetition, not Frankfurt’s full philosophical claim about bullshit’s corrosive effect on public discourse generally,” he explained.
The second limitation involves how the sources were presented to the participants. “Our manipulation relied on labeling someone a ‘bullshitter’ or ‘liar’ via source instructions, not on demonstrably truth-indifferent behavior itself,” Petrocelli noted. “So strictly speaking, these findings are about the effects of the label and its associated expectations, and future work really needs designs where bullshit is behaviorally instantiated rather than just described.”
Future investigations will likely focus on expanding these initial discoveries into more complex scenarios. The current research relied on neutral, trivia-style statements, but real-world misinformation often centers around highly emotional topics. “One is moving from neutral trivia statements to emotionally charged, real-world content, political claims, health misinformation, since motivated reasoning could plausibly amplify or dampen these effects,” Petrocelli said of his next steps.
He also plans to test whether the effect holds when people are not explicitly warned about a source’s intentions. “And longer-term, we want to push toward interventions, could platforms or media literacy programs actually teach people to detect truth-indifference specifically, as opposed to just teaching general fact-checking or lie-detection skills, which our work suggests may not transfer well to bullshit?” he added.
The study, “When fools have greater influence than liars: testing the insidious bullshit hypothesis with the illusory truth effect,” was authored by John V. Petrocelli, Elijah N. Rice, and Joseph M. Curran.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BullshitResearch #IllusoryTruthEffect #Misinformation #PublicKnowledge #SourceIndifference #TruthBias #MediaLiteracy #PsychologyStudy #FactChecking #DisinformationChallenges
-
DATE: July 17, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New psychology research reveals the insidious nature of bullshit
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
A recent study published in Current Psychology suggests that people are more likely to believe false information when it comes from someone who ignores the truth rather than a liar who actively tries to deceive. The research indicates that repeating statements made by someone indifferent to facts heavily increases how truthful those statements feel to readers. These findings provide evidence that casual disregard for reality poses a uniquely potent threat to public knowledge and belief.
The digital age makes tracking misinformation increasingly difficult. Information often spreads not just through intentional deception, but through a behavior known in psychology as bullshitting. In academic terms, a liar is someone who knows the truth and intentionally tries to mislead an audience. A bullshitter, on the other hand, communicates with little to no regard for the truth, evidence, or established facts.
A statement made by a bullshitter might happen to be true, or it might be false. The defining characteristic is the speaker’s total indifference to reality. Because bullshitters do not actively try to hide a specific truth, people often judge them less harshly than they judge outright liars.
John V. Petrocelli, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University and author of the book The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, wanted to test the real-world impact of this behavior. He noted that philosopher Harry Frankfurt proposed the insidious bullshit hypothesis in 1986. This idea suggests that society’s tolerance for bullshitting actually creates more long-term harm to public knowledge than lying.
Past research supports this distinction. In a 2023 study, Petrocelli and his colleagues explored how untrustworthy sources influence consumer attitudes over time. Participants read an advertisement for a fictitious gluten-free pizza and then learned the advertiser was either a known liar or a known bullshitter.
After a two-week delay, participants who had been warned about the bullshitter reported more positive attitudes toward the pizza than those warned about the liar. This demonstrated a “sleeper effect,” where the deceptive influence of the bullshitter actually grew stronger over time. The researchers also found that people possess a higher “dismissal readiness” for lies, meaning they find it easier to entirely reject a known lie than a statement of bullshit.
“We’d already found that people evaluate bullshitting less harshly than lying, consistent with Frankfurt’s (1986) essay,” Petrocelli explained. “But the harder question Frankfurt raised, and one almost nobody had tested empirically, was whether bullshit actually does more damage to what people believe, precisely because it doesn’t trigger the same skepticism a known lie does.”
To test this idea further, researchers examined how bullshitting interacts with the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe false information is correct simply after hearing it multiple times. When the human brain encounters a repeated statement, it processes that information more easily, and people often mistake this mental ease for actual truth.
Scientists wanted to see if knowing the source of a claim changes this effect. “The illusory truth effect literature gave me a clean, well-validated paradigm to test that consequence directly, rather than just people’s attitudes about bullshitting,” Petrocelli said. If a person knows a statement comes from a bullshitter rather than a liar, they might not filter the repeated information as strictly.
To investigate these dynamics, the authors designed a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, 204 undergraduate students evaluated 42 different statements. Half of these statements were factual, and half were completely false.
The participants were told the statements came from either an average person, a known liar, or a known bullshitter. The researchers provided specific definitions of a liar and a bullshitter to the participants to ensure they understood the difference. The students then rated how likely each statement was to be true on an 11-point scale.
The data showed that participants rated statements from an alleged bullshitter as more truthful than the exact same statements made by an alleged liar. The average person was trusted the most, but the bullshitter was trusted significantly more than the liar. This initial finding shows people naturally assign a higher likelihood of truth to bullshitting than they do to intentional lies.
The specific terms used to describe the sources were not the main driver of these results. “Just that the labels themselves turned out to matter less than we expected, it wasn’t simply that ‘bullshitter’ sounds better than ‘liar’,” Petrocelli said. “When we controlled for the base rate of false statements in Experiment 3 and gave very explicit, careful definitions of what the source’s instructions were, the effect held up.”
Petrocelli added that this consistency was reassuring. “That gives me more confidence this is really tracking something about how people process source-indifference to truth, not just a reaction to a loaded word,” he explained. The researchers then moved to test how this baseline trust interacts with repeated exposure in a second experiment.
In the second experiment, 293 students participated in a test of the illusory truth effect. The researchers exposed participants to 66 statements and asked them to rate how interesting they were. This served as an initial exposure phase, where some statements appeared once, and some appeared twice.
Before the final truth rating task, the authors separated the participants into different groups. One group was told the author of the statements was instructed to include some obvious lies. Another group was told the author was instructed to include statements with no regard for the truth.
The scientists also manipulated when the participants received a warning about the false information. Half the participants were warned before they read any statements during the initial phase. The other half read the statements first and were warned only before the final truth rating task.
During the final task, everyone rated the truthfulness of 88 statements on a six-point scale. These included a mix of entirely new claims and the repeated claims from the first phase. The researchers then compared how the different warnings affected the students’ beliefs.
The results revealed that forewarning people about falsity before they read the statements reduced the illusory truth effect across all groups. However, when the warning came after the initial exposure, a major difference emerged. Participants in the liar and control groups successfully corrected their judgments, recognizing the false statements as untrue.
In contrast, participants in the bullshitter group still fell for the illusory truth effect. Even after learning the author had no regard for the truth, these students rated the repeated false statements as highly truthful. The repetition of the bullshit claims successfully tricked their minds into believing the statements.
Petrocelli found this specific dynamic particularly intriguing. “The most striking pattern to me was that forewarning worked very differently depending on timing,” he said. “When people were warned before exposure that some information might be bullshit or lies, the illusory truth effect was largely neutralized across the board.”
The delayed warning produced an entirely different response. “But when people only learned after the fact that they’d been exposed to bullshit, the effect not only persisted for bullshit, it was the strongest condition in the whole design,” Petrocelli noted. Lies and honest control claims actually got corrected downward once people learned the truth after exposure.
“That asymmetry, corrective efforts working for lies but seemingly backfiring or simply not working for bullshit, was the clearest empirical signature of insidiousness we could have hoped for,” Petrocelli explained. To confirm these patterns, the researchers conducted a third experiment with 318 students. The setup was nearly identical to the second experiment, but with a strict condition to ensure the results were not just based on assumptions about lying frequencies.
They explicitly told participants that exactly half of the statements were false, lies, or bullshit, depending on the assigned group. This held the frequency of deception completely equal across all scenarios. The authors found the exact same pattern as the previous test, providing evidence that repeated exposure to truth-indifferent claims bypasses critical thinking.
These outcomes suggest that recognizing a source as a liar stops the brain from linking repetition to truth, but recognizing a source as a bullshitter fails to put up the same mental blockade. Petrocelli highlighted how this tendency leaves people vulnerable. “The instinct to relax your guard around someone who’s ‘just talking out of their hat’ rather than deliberately lying to you is exactly backwards,” he explained.
“A known liar’s claims get flagged and rejected; a bullshitter’s claims, because they’re not certainly false, slide by with much less resistance, and repetition alone makes them feel truer over time,” Petrocelli said. He suggested that people change how they evaluate everyday conversations. “If anything, the practical takeaway is: don’t just ask ‘is this person lying to me,’ ask ‘does this person actually know or care whether this is true,’ and treat repeated exposure to indifferent talk with at least as much scrutiny as you’d give a claim you know to be contested,” he recommended.
Recognizing the boundaries of this study helps place the findings into proper context. Petrocelli pointed out two main caveats regarding the research. “First, our operationalization is narrow: we tested one specific cognitive manifestation of insidiousness, the magnitude of the illusory truth effect under repetition, not Frankfurt’s full philosophical claim about bullshit’s corrosive effect on public discourse generally,” he explained.
The second limitation involves how the sources were presented to the participants. “Our manipulation relied on labeling someone a ‘bullshitter’ or ‘liar’ via source instructions, not on demonstrably truth-indifferent behavior itself,” Petrocelli noted. “So strictly speaking, these findings are about the effects of the label and its associated expectations, and future work really needs designs where bullshit is behaviorally instantiated rather than just described.”
Future investigations will likely focus on expanding these initial discoveries into more complex scenarios. The current research relied on neutral, trivia-style statements, but real-world misinformation often centers around highly emotional topics. “One is moving from neutral trivia statements to emotionally charged, real-world content, political claims, health misinformation, since motivated reasoning could plausibly amplify or dampen these effects,” Petrocelli said of his next steps.
He also plans to test whether the effect holds when people are not explicitly warned about a source’s intentions. “And longer-term, we want to push toward interventions, could platforms or media literacy programs actually teach people to detect truth-indifference specifically, as opposed to just teaching general fact-checking or lie-detection skills, which our work suggests may not transfer well to bullshit?” he added.
The study, “When fools have greater influence than liars: testing the insidious bullshit hypothesis with the illusory truth effect,” was authored by John V. Petrocelli, Elijah N. Rice, and Joseph M. Curran.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
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Thank you to the 20 participants that have taken part so far. Still need another 80 participants 🙏🏻 let's see if we can reach that target.
Participants must be #UK residents and be aged between 18-64.Link: https://mmu.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_es6NsOuhpxXYYtM
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Thank you to the 20 participants that have taken part so far. Still need another 80 participants 🙏🏻 let's see if we can reach that target.
Participants must be #UK residents and be aged between 18-64.Link: https://mmu.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_es6NsOuhpxXYYtM
Please share if you can, would be greatly appreciated.
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Thank you to the 20 participants that have taken part so far. Still need another 80 participants 🙏🏻 let's see if we can reach that target.
Participants must be #UK residents and be aged between 18-64.Link: https://mmu.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_es6NsOuhpxXYYtM
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As part of my MSc Psychology at Manchester Met University, I’m studying how social media use relates to wellbeing in UK adults (18–64, active users). 10–15 min survey on active vs passive use, mood and wellbeing.
Do not participate if currently experiencing mental health problems.
https://mmu.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_es6NsOuhpxXYYtM#CallForParticipants #PsychologyStudy #ResearchStudy #MentalHealthResearch #DigitalWellbeing #SocialMediaUse #UKParticipants #Wellbeing #SurveyParticipants #MScPsychology
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As part of my MSc Psychology at Manchester Met University, I’m studying how social media use relates to wellbeing in UK adults (18–64, active users). 10–15 min survey on active vs passive use, mood and wellbeing.
Do not participate if currently experiencing mental health problems.
https://mmu.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_es6NsOuhpxXYYtM#CallForParticipants #PsychologyStudy #ResearchStudy #MentalHealthResearch #DigitalWellbeing #SocialMediaUse #UKParticipants #Wellbeing #SurveyParticipants #MScPsychology
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As part of my MSc Psychology at Manchester Met University, I’m studying how social media use relates to wellbeing in UK adults (18–64, active users). 10–15 min survey on active vs passive use, mood and wellbeing.
Do not participate if currently experiencing mental health problems.
https://mmu.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_es6NsOuhpxXYYtM#CallForParticipants #PsychologyStudy #ResearchStudy #MentalHealthResearch #DigitalWellbeing #SocialMediaUse #UKParticipants #Wellbeing #SurveyParticipants #MScPsychology
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As part of my MSc Psychology at Manchester Met University, I’m studying how social media use relates to wellbeing in UK adults (18–64, active users). 10–15 min survey on active vs passive use, mood and wellbeing.
Do not participate if currently experiencing mental health problems.
https://mmu.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_es6NsOuhpxXYYtM#CallForParticipants #PsychologyStudy #ResearchStudy #MentalHealthResearch #DigitalWellbeing #SocialMediaUse #UKParticipants #Wellbeing #SurveyParticipants #MScPsychology
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