Air pollution in China has been drawing considerable attention in recent years. The emergence of new energy vehicles provides hope to reduce air pollutant emission. However, consumers' recognition and acceptance of NEVs remain at the early stage. This research aims to explore how consumers' environmental concern influences their NEV purchase intention. Specifically, this research conducted an online survey and an experiment to address the following issues: how consumers' psychological distance toward air pollution influences their purchase intention for NEVs, (...) and does their risk perception of the consequences of air pollution mediate this influence; whether consumers' perceived price level of NEVs plays a moderating role in the relationship between risk perception and purchase intention; and whether the construal level of stimulus can be manipulated to influence consumers' PD toward air pollution to increase their purchase intention for NEVs. The results of study 1, based on a total of 293 valid samples, show that consumers' PD toward air pollution significantly affects their purchase intention for NEVs, and risk perception of the consequences of air pollution plays a considerable mediating role. Meanwhile, consumers' perceived price level of NEVs has a significant negative moderating effect on the relationship between risk perception and purchase intention. The results of study 2, based on an online experiment, show that the construal level of stimulus can influence consumers' PD toward air pollution, which in turn affects their purchase intention for NEVs. The findings of this research have implications for businesses' promotional strategies and governments' policies. For instance, low-construal-level promotional materials can be developed to arouse consumers' environmental concern, thereby facilitating their eco-friendly consumption behavior. Governmental financial assistance and other policies can also increase consumers' willingness to purchase NEVs. (shrink)

As information flows at ever-increasing speeds across technological innovation networks, it is crucial to optimize reciprocity among partnering enterprises. However, the impact of psychological distance on subgroup reciprocity in such networks has not yet been investigated. To address this gap, the current study drew on theories of faultlines and cohesive subgroups to model the relationship between psychological distance and subgroup reciprocity within technological innovation networks. Our hypotheses were tested using data from 174 respondents working in Yunnan (...) Province, China. The results were as follows: first, psychological distance had negative effects on subgroup reciprocity in technological innovation networks; second, relationship-divisive and innovation-divisive faultlines negatively impacted reciprocity within and between subgroups; third, the faultlines partially mediated the negative relationship between psychological distance and intra-subgroup reciprocity; and fourth, the negative relationship between psychological distance and subgroup reciprocity was not mediated by the faultlines. The findings uncover the psychological mechanism of subgroup reciprocity within technological innovation networks. They will inform the decision-making process of enterprises when selecting partners within their technological innovation networks and support the development of effective reciprocal relationships with other innovators. (shrink)

Social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic has presented millions of people with extraordinary challenges that are associated with significant amounts of stress. Emotion regulation is crucial during this crisis as people seek to mitigate the stress and uncertainty of the present moment. In this study, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of 297 adults from the United States on their levels of perceived stress related to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as their level of engagement of different emotion regulation strategies (...) during the pandemic. We performed multiple linear regression analyses to assess which regulation strategies were associated with individual differences in perceived stress. Among all emotion regulation strategies, psychological distancing, which involves thinking about stressful circumstances in an objective, impartial way, was uniquely associated with reductions in perceived stress due to COVID-19 across individuals. This effect was not moderated by age, gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, or trait-related difficulty in regulating emotion. Conversely, situation modification was associated with significantly greater perceived stress overall. These results suggest the broad applicability and utility of psychological distancing during pandemic-related social distancing as part of an adaptive emotion regulation toolkit and motivate the investigation of interventions involving psychological distancing in this context. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the exhibition of artworks in museums and galleries. Many have displayed their collection online. In this context, experiencing an online exhibition is essential for visitors to appreciate and understand the artwork. Compared with offline exhibitions, visitors to online exhibitions are often unable to communicate their experiences with other visitors. Therefore, in this study, by facilitating communication via Zoom call, we established a system that allows two people to visit the museum together through the Google (...) Arts and Culture website. To reduce the psychological distance between online visitors and help increase user engagement, we designed and developed a media device based on moiré pattern visualization of electroencephalography signals. The participants were divided into two groups to visit the online museum, communicating remotely through Zoom. The objective of this study was to test whether a real-time EEG signal visualization device could help close the psychological distance between participants and whether it could increase user engagement with the online exhibition. Participants were randomly assigned to either the normal online exhibition experience group or EEG signal visualization device group. Participants in the NOEE group experienced four online exhibitions together. The conditions for participants in the ESVD group remained the same, apart from adding a media device to enable them to visualize EEG signals. A total of 40 university students participated in this study. Independent samples t-tests revealed that participants in the ESVD group perceived a significantly closer psychological distance between themselves and the participants on the opposite side than those in the NOEE group. A one-way ANOVA revealed that participants experienced Task3 with significantly closer psychological distance assessments than Task1, Task2, and Task4. Repeated ANOVAs revealed that participants in the ESVD group had higher overall user engagement than those in the NOEE group, with marginal significance. Thus, this study shows that EEG visualization media devices can reduce the psychological distance between two participants when experiencing an online exhibition. Moreover, it can increase user engagement to some extent. (shrink)

Three studies examined the effect of primed psychological distance on level of perceptual construal, using Navon’s paradigm of composite letters (global letters that are made of local letters). Relative to a control group, thinking of the more distant future (Study 1), about more distant spatial locations (Study 2), and about more distant social relations (Study 3) facilitated perception of global letters relative to local letters. Proximal times, spatial locations, and social relations had the opposite effect. The results are (...) discussed within the framework of Construal Level Theory of psychological distance (Liberman & Trope, 2008; Trope & Liberman, 2003). (shrink)

Construal-level theory emphasizes that representing events at greater spatial, temporal, social, or hypothetical distance results in processing information at high construal levels (more conceptual, abstract). We posit that psychological distance and construal level are somewhat separable constructs, and can have different effects on emotion, and therefore, emotion regulation. We argue that psychological distance influences emotional appraisal, such that increasing distance results in lower emotion intensity, which can be leveraged to down-regulate emotions. However, we consider (...) construal level a mindset, which can occur with either high or low psychological distance. Furthermore, we argue that compared with psychological distance, construal level has a more nuanced relationship with emotion, and changing construal level for the purpose of changing emotion also requires considering the construal level of one's emotion-regulation goals. (shrink)

Psychological distance effects have attracted the attention of behavioral economists in the context of descriptive modeling and behavioral policy. Indeed, psychological distance effects have been shown for an increasing number of domains and applications relevant to economic decision-making. The current paper questions whether these effects are robust enough for economists to apply them to relevant policy questions. We demonstrate systematic replication failures for the distance-from-a-distance effect shown by Maglio et al., and relate them to (...) theoretical arguments suggesting that psychological distance theories are currently too poorly specified to make predictions that are precise enough for economic analyses. (shrink)

Green housing is a new type of building that advocates energy saving and environmental protection. How to stimulate buyers to buy green housing under the background of high cost is the key problem to guide green consumption. First of all, based on the existing literature, the comment of homebuyers was divided into comment quantity, comment quality, comment titer and evaluator credibility. The psychological distance mediation variable was introduced, and three dimensions of time distance, social distance, and (...) space distance were selected to construct the influence model of homebuyer comment on green housing purchase intention. Meanwhile, the concept model was built, and questionnaires were adopted for empirical analysis. On this basis, considering the long-term purchase behavior of buyers, the influence model of homebuyers' second comment on green housing purchase intention with the Hotelling model was established. The results show that comment quality, comment titer, and the credit rating of the evaluator have a positive effect on green housing purchase intention while comment quantity has no significant effect. Psychological distance plays a mediation role between comment quality, comment titer, the credit rating of the evaluator, and green housing purchase intention while having a mediation effect between comment quantity and green housing purchase intention. In the long-term purchase behavior of green housing, psychological distance plays a greater role than price. At last, some suggestions were proposed. (shrink)

There is a high need for cognition on earthquake risk to improve the public’s risk knowledge and risk awareness, so that they can make right decisions and take quick actions regarding mitigation measures and adjustments. In this study, search engine query data from the Baidu Index were extracted to reveal the information search behaviors of the Chinese public regarding the earthquake risk from 2010 to 2012. The data were also analyzed to discuss the characteristics of need for cognition on a (...) nationwide scale and over the long term. The results showed that graphic representations of need for cognition adhere to a “half-peak pattern” before and after earthquake events and dimensions in psychological distance theory, such as temporal distance, spatial distance, and social distance influence the need for cognition on earthquake risk that was the time and spatial discount effect. The implications for theory and practice regarding risk communication and management are discussed and concluded. (shrink)

The fast-paced lifestyle resulting from China's rapid economic development has caused more than 500 million sudden cardiac deaths in 2020. Online first-aid education for the public is considered a key potential solution to avoid such incidents and would have great practical value. This study focuses on understanding the impact of past first-aid experience on the intention for online learning of first-aid knowledge and skills from the perspective of individual psychological factors based on the construction level and prosociality theories. More (...) specifically, it tests the mediating roles of psychological distances and prosociality, which reflect psychological status, in the relationship between experience and learning intention along with a series of associated demographic variables. Primary data collected via a survey are analyzed through regression analysis. The results show that first-aid experience has a significant positive impact on online first-aid learning intention. In addition, psychological distances from first-aid events, and prosociality, play mediating roles in the relationship between first-aid experience and learning intention. Thus, this study contributes to understanding first-aid learning intention by revealing the impact of the individual factors of psychological distances and prosociality. (shrink)

Global warming and other climate issues seriously threaten global sustainable development. As citizen environmental behavior can have a positive impact on the environment, it is of great theoretical significance and practical reference value to study the impact of psychological distance theory on citizen environmental behavior. This study obtained 2,633 related studies from 1980 to 2020 from the Web of Science as research objects, and used CiteSpace, VOSviewer, Netdraw, and other software programs to perform a bibliometric analysis, which can (...) show the complex relationship implied in the citation, intuitively grasp the development context and hot frontier in this field, and help scholars better study citizen environmental behavior. The results and conclusions are as follows. The related research covered three periods: infancy, growth, and outbreak. Chronologically, the relevant research evolved from building models to analyze the impact of environmental enrichment on human environmental behavior, to studying the motivation behind citizen environmental behavior, and finally to paying attention to sustainable development. A cluster analysis of high-frequency keywords identified three research hotspots: “drivers of psychological distance of environmental change perception on citizen environmental behavior,” “impact of social distance on adolescents’ behavior,” and “construal level theory and citizen green behavior.” Based on these findings, possible future research directions were identified, including changing from a single theory to a combination of multiple theories to comprehensively study citizen environmental protection behavior; analyzing the motivation of citizen environmental behavior and summarizing the general motivation of environmental behavior according to its internal relationship; and determining how to narrow the global psychological distance, strengthen the awareness of the community of human destiny, and explore the establishment of an efficient global climate cooperation mechanism. (shrink)

Leadership styles, especially empowering leadership, affect the psychological relationship between employees and organizations, and then affect employees’ positive behavior in the organization. In this research, we studied the effects of empowering leadership and psychological distance on employees’ pro-environmental behavior and explored the mechanism of green organizational climate. By adopting correlation analysis, statistical analysis, and regression analysis, we conducted a multisource field study of 873 valid employee questionnaires to verify our theoretical model. The results showed that empowering leadership (...) had a significant positive impact on psychological distance and employees’ pro-environmental behavior; and psychological distance played a partly intermediation role in the relationship between empowering leadership and employees’ pro-environmental behavior. Moreover, GOC can promote employees’ pro-environmental behavior, but it cannot regulate between psychological distance and employees’ pro-environmental behavior. The findings obtained some intriguing insights that could help to better guide employees toward pro-environmental behavior. (shrink)

The growth of urban violence in Brazil, as in other countries, has led citizens to demand more severe and punitive measures to solve the problem of juvenile crime. One motion submitted to the Brazilian parliament, for instance, proposes to reduce the age of penal majority from 18 to 16 years. Our hypothesis is that popular opinions about this proposal are largely constrained by construal levels and psychological distance. Accordingly, we expect that the knowledge and proximity to the circumstances (...) associated with juvenile transgression will influence opinions about the proposal. To test this hypothesis, we evaluated how opinion against or for the proposal can be explained by psychological distance and moral development theory. We studied two samples, composed of people who do not have a deep experience with the subject and workers from a juvenile justice court. After collecting socio-demographic information from the subjects and their answer to moral dilemmas, the data was subjected to a multivariate analysis by multimodal logistic regression for socio-demographic characteristics, Kohlberg moral stages, and opinion on the reduction of APM as dependent variables. Our findings suggest that 1) opinion about the APM depends on psychological distance and 2) socioeconomic variables may influence the average construal level of adolescent transgressors in the public’s perspective. (shrink)

This research examines how one’s construal level of a crisis differs by crisis type, and how the interplay of crisis type and apology appeal type impacts the effectiveness of apology messages in a corporate crisis context. Findings indicate that one’s mental construal toward a crisis varies by crisis type, with a self-threatening crisis leading to a lower level of construal than a society-threatening one. Findings further suggest that in a society-threatening crisis condition, an informational apology was more effective than an (...) emotional one. However, in a self-threatening crisis condition, there was no significant difference between two different message types. These findings offer valuable guidelines for developing effective crisis response strategy. (shrink)

The metaphor of culture as a space or environment of meaning is widely employed. Going beyond metaphor, we present a model of culture as a 3-dimensional Euclidean space, using data from Brazil on cultural models of life goals. The dimensions of this space are defined by degree of sharing of culture (cultural competence); alternate configurations of that shared meaning (residual agreement); and social practice (cultural consonance). A cultural distance metric calculated within those dimensions identifies an individuals’ proximity to prototypical (...) goals; greater distance from these goals is associated with higher psychological distress. Cultural distance is in turn influenced by one’s sense of personal agency. Finally, in a set of open-ended interviews, the more individuals employ spatial metaphors in talking about culturally defined life goals, the higher their sense of personal agency and cultural consonance. This model moves the discussion of culture as a space of meaning from metaphor to measurement. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have disagreed about whether "the folk" are intuitively incompatibilists or compatibilists, and they have disagreed about the role of abstraction in generating such intuitions. New experimental evidence using Construal Level Theory is presented. The experiments support the views that the folk are intuitively both incompatibilists and compatibilists, and that abstract mental representations do shift intuitions, but not in a univocal way.

In this study, we discuss the psychological acceptability of an utterance strategy used by the Driving Support Agent. Previous literature regarding DSA suggests that the adoption of a small robot as a form will increase acceptability. However, the agent’s utterance has been reported as a problem faced by the user. Therefore, in this study, we designed the agent’s utterance using politeness strategy as described by Brown and Levinson’s famous sociolinguistics and pragmatics theory and analyzed its acceptability through a participant-based (...) experiment. In this experiment, we used positive and negative politeness strategies. In general, PPS is utilized to reflect the desire to be liked/recognized by others, whereas NPS is utilized to reflect the need for not wanting to be disturbed by others. Based on our results, PPS was rated high compared to NPS. Therefore, many participants highly evaluated PPS. However, there was a group of participants who appreciated NPS. There were also participants who evaluated the two strategies equally. The number of participants in these three groups was observed at 4:1:1. This result contributes as an index on the utterance design of the DSA. (shrink)

Studies on learning have tended to endorse the importance of knowledge rather than the significance of the cultural contexts embedded in the different histories and biographies of learners. In order to investigate the relationship between these contexts and students' conceptions of learning, this study focuses on South African distance students' accounts of their personal experience and understanding of learning, using Giorgi's phenomenological psychology method to explore the learners' histories and aspirations as they construct and negotiate the meaning they attach (...) to learning. The findings indicate that the social environment, the culture, the political milieu and economic conditions are the most important determinants of conceptions of learning, with all these multiple contexts interacting to influence students' beliefs about learning, which in turn affect their approach to learning and hence their learning outcomes. It is thus argued that, in order to facilitate distance learning, the lifeworld of the learner needs to be both understood and brought to bear on the educational process. (shrink)

Studies on learning have tended to endorse the importance of knowledge rather than the significance of the cultural contexts embedded in the different histories and biographies of learners. In order to investigate the relationship between these contexts and students’ conceptions of learning, this study focuses on South African distance students’ accounts of their personal experience and understanding of learning, using Giorgi’s phenomenological psychology method to explore the learners’ histories and aspirations as they construct and negotiate the meaning they attach (...) to learning. The findings indicate that the social environment, the culture, the political milieu and economic conditions are the most important determinants of conceptions of learning, with all these multiple contexts interacting to influence students’ beliefs about learning, which in turn affect their approach to learning and hence their learning outcomes. It is thus argued that, in order to facilitate distance learning, the lifeworld of the learner needs to be both understood and brought to bear on the educational process. (shrink)

Gilead et al.'s theory presupposes that traversing temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical distances are largely interchangeable acts of mental travel that co-occur in human ontogeny. Yet, this claim is at odds with recent developmental data suggesting that children's reasoning is differentially affected by the dimension which they must traverse, and that different representational abilities underlie travel across different dimensions.

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high (...) memorability, and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positiveandnegative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our Distancing-Embracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories. (shrink)

In spring 2020, COVID-19 and the ensuing social distancing and stay-at-home orders instigated abrupt changes to employment and educational infrastructure, leading to uncertainty, concern, and stress among United States college students. The media consumption patterns of this and other social groups across the globe were affected, with early evidence suggesting viewers were seeking both pandemic-themed media and reassuring, familiar content. A general increase in media consumption, and increased consumption of specific types of content, may have been due to media use (...) for coping strategies. This paper examines the relationship between the stress and anxiety of university students and their strategic use of media for coping during initial social distancing periods in March-April 2020 using data from a cross-sectional survey. We examine links between specific types of media use with psychological well-being concepts, and examine the moderating roles of traits as buffers against negative relationships between stress and anxiety and psychological well-being. Our findings indicate that stress was linked to more hedonic and less eudaimonic media use, as well as more avoidant and escapist media-based coping. Anxiety, on the other hand, was linked to more media use in general, specifically more eudaimonic media use and a full range of media-based coping strategies. In turn, escapist media was linked to negative affect, while reframing media and eudaimonic media were linked to positive affect. Avoidant coping was tied to poorer mental health, and humor coping was tied to better mental health. Hedonic and need-satisfying media use were linked to more flourishing. Hope, optimism, and resilience were all predictive of media use, with the latter two traits moderating responses to stress and anxiety. The findings give a nuanced portrait of college students’ media use during a pandemic-induced shutdown, showing that media use is closely intertwined with well-being in both adaptive and maladaptive patterns. (shrink)

The intention of this project is to argue theoretically for, and exemplify through critical and historical analysis, the interrelatedness of discourses on scale, distance, identification and doubling in the cinema. The link between the first two terms (scale and distance) and the latter two (identification and doubling) is implicit in the title, and its unfolding constitutes the project: for instance, the closer one comes, the deeper identification is likely to be, and the greater the likelihood that what is (...) apparently 'there' will impose itself as also 'here', existing both inside and outside the viewing psyche, which becomes double, and whose doubling may either become explicit or remain implicit in the text. Along with its collapsing of interiority/exteriority distinctions, doubling reveals the reversibility and ambiguity of scale, as what is 'there' could just as well have been situated 'here'. The book contains analyses of a wide variety of films, including Citizen Kane, The Double Life of Veronique, The Great Gatsby, Gilda, Vertigo and Wings of Desire. (shrink)

Saṃvega is a morally motivating state of shock that -- according to Buddhaghosa -- should be evoked by meditating on death. What kind of mental state it is exactly, and how it is morally motivating is unclear, however. This article presents a theory of saṃvega -- what it is and how it works -- based on recent insights in psychology. According to dual process theories there are two kinds of mental processes organized in two" systems" : the experiential, automatic system (...) 1, and the rational, controlled system 2. In normal circumstances, system 1 does not believe in its own mortality. Saṃvega occurs when system 1 suddenly realizes that the "subjective self" will inevitably die (while system 2 is already disposed to affirm the subject's mortality). This results in a state of shock that is morally motivating under certain conditions. Saṃvega increases mortality salience and produces insight in suffering, and in combination with a strengthened sense of loving-kindness or empathic concern both mortality salience and insight in suffering produce moral motivation. (shrink)

Non-adjacent or long-distance dependencies (LDDs) are routinely considered to be a distinctive trait of language, which purportedly locates it higher than other sequentially organized signal systems in terms of structural complexity. This paper argues that particular languages display specific resources (e.g. non-interpretive morphological agreement paradigms) that help the brain system responsible for dealing with LDDs to develop the capacity of acquiring and processing expressions with such a human-typical degree of computational complexity. Independently obtained naturalistic data is discussed and put (...) to the service of the idea that the above-mentioned resources exert their developmental role from the outside, but in compliance with other internal resources, ultimately compounding an integrated developmental system. Parallels with other human and nonhuman developmental phenomena are explored, which point to the conclusion that the developmental system of concern can be assimilated to cases currently been conceptualized as ‘cue-response systems’ or ‘developmental hybrids’ within the ecological-developmental paradigm in theoretical biology. Such a conclusion is used to support the idea that both current externalist and internalist concepts fall short of a correct characterization of language. (shrink)

A summary of recent experimental results shows that entanglement can be generated more easily than before, and that there are improved chances for its persistence. An eminent finding of Generalised Quantum Theory is the insight that the notion of entanglement can be extended, such that, e.g., psychological or psychophysical problem areas can be included, too. First, a general condition for entanglement to occur is given by the term ‘common prearranged context’. A formalised treatment requires a quantitative definition of the (...) similarity or dissimilarity between two complex structures which takes their internal structures into account. After some specific remarks on distance, metrics, and semi-metrics in mathematics, a procedure is described for setting up a similarity function with the required properties. This procedure is in analogy with the two-step character of measurement and with the well-known properties of perspective notions. A general methodology can be derived for handling perspective notions. Finally, these concepts supply heuristic clues towards a formalised treatment of the notions of ‘meaning’ and ‘interpretation’. (shrink)