Frontiers in psychology
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2020
ReviewAwe and the Experience of the Sublime: A Complex Relationship.
Awe seems to be a complex emotion or emotional construct characterized by a mix of positive (contentment, happiness), and negative affective components (fear and a sense of being smaller, humbler or insignificant). It is striking that the elicitors of awe correspond closely to what philosophical aesthetics, and especially Burke and Kant, have called "the sublime." As a matter of fact, awe is almost absent from the philosophical agenda, while there are very few studies on the experience of the sublime as such in the psychological literature. ⋯ Once we have a clearer picture of how awe and the experience of the sublime are related, we can use it to enhance collaboration between these domains. We would be able to use empirical results about awe in a philosophical analysis of the experience of the sublime, which in turn can help us to design novel experimental hypotheses about the contexts in which we experience awe.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2020
Why Do Japanese People Use Masks Against COVID-19, Even Though Masks Are Unlikely to Offer Protection From Infection?
Wearing masks against 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) is beneficial in suppressing pandemic spread, not through preventing the wearer from being infected but by preventing the wearer from infecting others. Despite not providing much protection, the custom of wearing masks has prevailed in East Asia from the early stages of the pandemic, especially in Japan, to such an extent that it caused a shortfall in supply. Why do many Japanese people wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, even though masks are unlikely to prevent them from getting infected? We examined six possible psychological reasons for wearing masks: three involved expectations about the risk of infection and three involved other driving psychological forces. ⋯ However, risk reduction expectations did not affect mask usage. The social psychological motivations successfully explained much about mask usage. Our findings suggest that policymakers responsible for public health should consider social motivations when implementing public strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2020
Effects of Repetition Suppression on Sound Induced Flash Illusion With Aging.
The sound-induced flash illusion (SiFI) is a classical auditory-dominated multisensory integration phenomenon in which the observer misperceives the number of visual flashes due to the simultaneous presentation of a different number of auditory beeps. Although the SiFI has been documented to correlate with perceptual sensitivity, to date there is no consensus as to how it corresponds to sensitivity with aging. The present study was based on the SiFI paradigm (Shams et al., 2000), adding repeated auditory stimuli prior to the appearance of audiovisual stimuli to investigate the effects of repetition suppression (RS) on the SiFI with aging. ⋯ The illusion effect in old adults was weaker than in young adults. Specifically, RS only affected fission illusions in the old adults but both fission and fusion illusions in young adults. Thus, the present study indicated that the decreased perceptual sensitivity based on auditory RS could weaken the SiFI effect in multisensory integration and that old adults are more susceptible to RS, showing that old adults perceived the SiFI effect weakly under auditory RS.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2020
Modulators of the Personal and Professional Threat Perception of Olympic Athletes in the Actual COVID-19 Crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic is now a major global health issue, affecting world population and high-performance athlete too. The aim of the present research was to analyze the effect of psychological profile, academic schedule, and gender in the perception of personal and professional threat of Olympic and Paralympic athletes facing the 2021 Tokyo Olympiad in the actual COVID-19 crisis. ⋯ Neuroticism and psychological inflexibility presented the greatest negative feelings for female athletes (+32.59, p < 0.000, r = 0.13) and the perception that quarantine would negatively affect their sports performance. Finally professional athletes showed lower values in personality tests (Agreeableness factor) about COVID-19 crisis than non-professionals (-40.62, p < 0.012, r = 0.88).
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The last two decades have seen a growing interest in the study of interoception. Interoception can be understood as a hierarchical phenomenon, referring to the body-to-brain communication of internal signals, their sensing, encoding, and representation in the brain, influence on other cognitive and affective processes, and their conscious perception. Interoceptive signals have been notoriously challenging to manipulate in experimental settings. ⋯ Despite its intrinsic involvement in interoception, surprisingly little research in the field has used Vagus Nerve Stimulation to explicitly modulate bodily signals. Here, we review a range of cognitive, affective and clinical research using Vagus Nerve Stimulation, showing that it can be applied to the study of interoception at each level of its hierarchy. This could have considerable implications for our understanding of the interoceptive dimension of cognition and affect in both health and disease, and lead to development of new therapeutic tools.