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In the present research, we addressed the question of whether people harbor punitive attitudes against individuals sexually interested in children even if no sexual offense is mentioned and whether this effect is amplified by the clinical label pedophilia. In two online studies (total N  = 345), participants rated the extent to which they saw individuals sexually interested in children as necessarily committing child sexual abuse ( dangerousness ), responsible for their sexual interest ( intentionality ), and clinically disordered ( deviance ) before judging their endorsement of means of punishment ( punitive attitudes ). Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which either the “pedophilia” label or the descriptive term “sexual interest in (prepubescent) children” was included in all items. Across both studies, results showed high degrees of punitive attitudes against sexually deviant men, an effect that was particularly pronounced if the pedophilia label was present. Whereas this was only latently observable in Study 1 (concealed by a suppression effect of reduced ascriptions of intentionality), in Study 2 no such suppression was observed. Unlike any other stigma we know of, punitive attitudes against pedophiles were associated positively with social desirability, suggesting that participants saw it as particularly socially desirable to condemn someone based on their deviant sexual interest.

Despite the lack of evidence for negative health effects of masturbation, abstinence from masturbation is frequently recommended as a strategy to improve one’s sexual self-regulation. We adopted a framework of perceived problems with pornography to collect first hints about whether abstinence from masturbation stems from a psychological and behavioral “addiction” or conflicting attitudes. In an online questionnaire survey recruited via a non-thematic Reddit thread ( n  = 1063), most participants reported that they had tried to be abstinent from masturbation. As visible from zero-order correlations and multiple linear regression, motivation for abstinence was mostly associated with attitudinal correlates, specifically the perception of masturbation as unhealthy. While there were associations with hypersexuality, no significant correlation with behavioral markers such as maximum number of orgasms was found. Higher abstinence motivation was related to a higher perceived impact of masturbation, conservatism, and religiosity and to lower trust in science. We argue that research on abstinence from masturbation can enrich the understanding of whether and how average frequencies of healthy behavior are pathologized.

Humans make sense of their social environment by forming impressions of others that allow predicting others’ actions. In this process of social perception, two types of information carry pivotal importance: other entities’ communion (i.e., warmth and trustworthiness) and agency (i.e., status and power). Although commonly thought of as orthogonal dimensions, we propose that these Big Two of social perception are curvilinearly related. Specifically, as we delineate from four different theoretical explanations, impressions of communion should peak at average agency, while entities too high or too low on agency should be perceived as low on communion. We show this pattern for social groups across one novel and five previously published data sets, including a meta-analysis of the most comprehensive data collection in the group perception literature, consisting of 36 samples from more than 20 countries. Addressing the generalizability of this curvilinear relation, we then report recent and unpublished experiments establishing the effect for the perception of individuals and animals. On the basis of the proposed curvilinear relation, we revisit the primacy of processing communion (rather than agency) information. Finally, we discuss the possibility of a more general curvilinear relation between communion and dimensions other than agency.

People assign attributes to a different degree to other persons depending on whether these are male or female (sex role stereotypes). Such stereotypes continue to exist even in countries with lower gender inequality. The present research tested the idea that parents develop sex role consistent expectations of their babies’ attributes based on fetal sex (by ultrasound diagnostic), as well as gendered perceptions of their recently newborn babies. A total of 304 dyads of predominantly White expecting parents from Germany were followed over the course of pregnancy until after the birth and completed a sex role inventory on their babies’ expected (before birth) as well as perceived traits (after birth). Specifically, they rated to what extent they expected their babies to have normatively feminine traits (e.g., soft-spoken and warm) and normatively masculine traits (e.g., independent and assertive) twice before birth (first half of pregnancy, six weeks before due date) and to what extent they perceived their baby to have these traits eight weeks after birth. The results suggested that fathers held gendered expectations and perceptions, whereas mothers did not. These results suggest that male and female babies are likely to encounter sex role stereotypes about their alleged attributes as soon as their birth.

Since 2001 there has been a steadily increasing awareness of discrimination against Muslims based on their religion. Despite the widespread use of the neologism Islamophobia to refer to this phenomenon, this term has been harshly criticized for confounding prejudiced views of Muslims with a legitimate critique of Muslim practices based on secular grounds. In the current research a scale was developed to differentiate Islamoprejudice (based on the influential Islamophobia definition of the British Runnymede Trust) and Secular Critique of Islam. Across two studies, Islamoprejudice was related to explicit and implicit prejudice, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation whereas Secular Critique was unrelated to any forms of prejudice but negatively related to religiosity and authoritarianism. The two scales were mostly independent or only moderately related. Importantly, the new Islamoprejudice scale outperformed all other scales in predicting actual opposition versus support for a heatedly debated, newly built mosque. These results demonstrate the necessity to differentiate between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique in future research on attitudes towards Islam.

SignificanceHuman memory is fallible and malleable. In forensic settings in particular, this poses a challenge because people may falsely remember events with legal implications that never actually happened. Despite an urgent need for remedies, however, research on whether and how rich false autobiographical memories can be reversed under realistic conditions (i.e., using reversal strategies that can be applied in real-world settings) is virtually nonexistent. The present study therefore not only replicates and extends previous demonstrations of false memories but, crucially, documents their reversibility after the fact: Employing two ecologically valid strategies, we show that rich but false autobiographical memories can mostly be undone. Importantly, reversal was specific to false memories (i.e., did not occur for true memories). False memories of autobiographical events can create enormous problems in forensic settings (e.g., false accusations). While multiple studies succeeded in inducing false memories in interview settings, we present research trying to reverse this effect (and thereby reduce the potential damage) by means of two ecologically valid strategies. We first successfully implanted false memories for two plausible autobiographical events (suggested by the students’ parents, alongside two true events). Over three repeated interviews, participants developed false memories (measured by state-of-the-art coding) of the suggested events under minimally suggestive conditions (27%) and even more so using massive suggestion (56%). We then used two techniques to reduce false memory endorsement, source sensitization (alerting interviewees to possible external sources of the memories, e.g., family narratives) and false memory sensitization (raising the possibility of false memories being inadvertently created in memory interviews, delivered by a new interviewer). This reversed the false memory build-up over the first three interviews, returning false memory rates in both suggestion conditions to the baseline levels of the first interview (i.e., to ∼15% and ∼25%, respectively). By comparison, true event memories were endorsed at a higher level overall and less affected by either the repeated interviews or the sensitization techniques. In a 1-y follow-up (after the original interviews and debriefing), false memory rates further dropped to 5%, and participants overwhelmingly rejected the false events. One strong practical implication is that false memories can be substantially reduced by easy-to-implement techniques without causing collateral damage to true memories.

Research suggests that belief in conspiracy theories (CT) stems from basic psychological mechanisms and is linked to other belief systems (e.g., religious beliefs). While previous research has extensively examined individual and contextual variables associated with CT beliefs, it has not yet investigated the role of culture. In the current research, we tested, based on a situated cultural cognition perspective, the extent to which culture predicts CT beliefs. Using Hofstede 's model of cultural values, three nation-level analyses of data from 25, 19, and 18 countries using different measures of CT beliefs (Study 1, N = 5323; Study 2a, N = 12,255; Study 2b, N = 30,994) revealed positive associations between masculinity, collectivism, and CT beliefs. A crosssectional study among U.S. citizens (Study 3, N = 350), using individual-level measures of Hofstede's values, replicated these findings. A meta-analysis of correlations across studies corroborated the presence of positive links between CT beliefs, collectivism, r = .31, 95% CI = [.15; .47], and masculinity, r = .39, 95% CI = [.18; .59]. Our results suggest that in addition to individual differences and contextual variables, cultural factors also play an important role in shaping CT beliefs.

It is almost a cultural truism that erotic images attract our attention, presumably because paying attention to erotic stimuli provided our ancestors with mating benefits. Attention, however, can be narrowly defined as visuospatial attention (keeping such stimuli in view) or more broadly as cognitive attention (such stimuli taking up one’s thoughts). We present four independent studies aiming to test the extent to which erotic images have priority in capturing visuospatial versus cognitive attention. Whereas the former would show in quicker reactions to stimuli presented in locations where erotic images appeared previously, the latter causes delayed responding after erotic images, independent of their location). To this end, we specifically modified spatial cueing tasks to disentangle visuospatial attention capture from general sexual content-induced delay (SCID) effects—a major drawback in the previous literature. Consistently across all studies (total N  = 399), we found no evidence in support of visuospatial attention capture but reliably observed an unspecific delay of responding for trials in which erotic images appeared (irrespective of cue location). This SCID is equally large for heterosexual men and women and reliably associated with their self-reported sexual excitability.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many journals swiftly changed their editorial policies and peer-review processes to accelerate the provision of knowledge about COVID-related issues to a wide audience. These changes may have favoured speed at the cost of accuracy and methodological rigour. In this study, we compare 100 COVID-related articles published in four major psychological journals between 2020 and 2022 with 100 non-COVID articles from the same journal issues and 100 pre-COVID articles published between 2017 and 2019. Articles were coded with regard to design features, sampling and recruitment features, and openness and transparency practices. Even though COVID research was, by and large, more ‘observational’ in nature and less experimentally controlled than non- or pre-COVID research, we found that COVID-related studies were more likely to use ‘stronger’ (i.e. more longitudinal and fewer cross-sectional) designs, larger samples, justify their sample sizes based on a priori power analysis, pre-register their hypotheses and analysis plans and make their data, materials and code openly available. Thus, COVID-related psychological research does not appear to be less rigorous in these regards than non-COVID research.