The university period is a stage of life often associated with lower levels of psychological well-being and life satisfaction, highlighting the need to investigate factors contributing to this decline. This study aimed to examine the relationship between temperament and psychological well-being, and the potential mediating role of perceived social support, in a sample of Spanish university students (N = 332; M = 19.28). Participants completed a set of self-report instruments, including the Adult Temperament Questionnaire, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and the Scales of Psychological Well-Being. Results showed that high levels of negative emotionality, and low levels of effortful control and surgency, significantly predicted poorer outcomes across multiple psychological well-being dimensions. Perceived social support, particularly from family and friends, also contributed significantly to higher well-being, more so than support from other significant individuals. Furthermore, complementary and indirect-only mediation effects of perceived social support were identified between temperament constructs and well-being dimensions. Overall, these findings enhance our understanding of the interplay between temperament, social support, and psychological well-being during emerging adulthood, within the Spanish cultural context.
In an era of pervasive misinformation, understanding the cognitive factors that reduce susceptibility to conspiracy theories is of growing societal and scientific importance. This study investigates whether scientific reasoning - as a domain-general epistemic skill - predicts belief in both medical (e.g., COVID-19related) and political (e.g., Ukraine war-related) conspiracy theories. Using a sample of 409 Slovak adults, we examine whether scientific reasoning explains variance in conspiracy beliefs beyond what is accounted for by analytic thinking alone. Hierarchical regressions show that scientific reasoning consistently predicts lower endorsement of both medical and political conspiracy theories, outperforming analytic thinking, which only predicts political ones. These findings support the view that evaluating claims based on principles such as testability and evidence is a generalizable cognitive asset. Our results underscore the need to cultivate domain-general scientific reasoning skills, not just analytic thinking, to counter epistemically suspect beliefs across diverse contexts.
Non-evidence-based traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine (TCAM) practices can lead to harmful health outcomes, so media reporting about it should be responsible. Drawing from a media content analysis, we created three vignettes about a fictional herbal product: one repeatedly appealed to tradition, one used extensive pseudoscientific jargon, and one followed WHO reporting guidelines (i.e., active control). In an online community sample (N = 366), we tested their effects on product preference, and if these were more pronounced in individuals receptive to pseudo-profound verbalisms, magical health beliefs, and positive attitudes toward TCAM. Unexpectedly, reading the vignettes decreased product preference; the decrease was smaller in those prone to magical health beliefs and receptive to pseudo-profound verbalisms. The effect might stem from the overuse of arguments, making the interventions resemble the so-called ‘paradoxical thinking interventions’. Future research should find a "tipping point" that reverses the effect by varying the number of supportive claims.
Gratitude has well-documented positive effects on well-being, including in work contexts. However, limited research has explored how distinct dimensions of work-specific gratitude uniquely influence employee outcomes. This study addresses this gap by investigating whether the three subscales of the Work Gratitude Scale (WGS) predict employee outcomes beyond personality traits, while highlighting the differential importance of each subscale. A sample of 300 full-time employees from the US completed measures of conscientiousness, emotional stability, work gratitude, well-being, distress, and work performance. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that, after controlling for conscientiousness and emotional stability, only one dimension of gratitude - grateful appraisals - significantly predicted well-being, distress, and performance. These findings offer valuable theoretical insights and practical guidance for researchers and practitioners examining the role of gratitude in the workplace.
This study examines the interplay of psychological distance, personal norms, and social norms in pro-environmental behavior. Data were collected through face-to-face surveys using snowball and convenience sampling methods, yielding a final sample of 955 participants aged 18 to 74 (M = 34.31, SD = 10.37). We hypothesized that lower psychological distance would be associated with stronger personal and social norms, which, in turn, would predict higher pro-environmental behavior. The structural model explained 50.9% of the variance in behavior, suggesting that perceiving climate change as immediate and concrete is associated with stronger pro-environmental actions through heightened moral obligation. Latent class analysis confirmed the model’s robustness across groups. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of strengthening norms and reducing psychological distance to enhance public engagement in pro-environmental behavior.
Social entrepreneurship is a hybrid form of entrepreneurship combining the aspirations to fulfil a social mission and independently generate financial income on a competitive market. While social enterprises offer notable chances to make up for inefficiencies in sustainable social value creation by governments and Non-Governmental Organizations during social hardships, they face the risk of losing their social missions over time. This effect is coined mission drift (MD). To date, MD-research suffers from notable shortcomings like the negligence of possible effects on social enterprise employees and robust experimental evidence. My study employs a sample of university students (N = 137) and a vignette-based experimental design to examine how different kinds of MD (no MD; soft MD, strong MD, mission shift from social to ecological) affect important work-related attitudes of social enterprise employees. MANOVA results yield that, compared to no MD, strong MD has a notable and broad detrimental impact. Furthermore, indications for differential effects depending on MD-magnitude and for mission shift are found. Despite acknowledgeable limitations, the current study emphasizes the importance of an employee perspective on MD and offers rare causal evidence on MD-consequences.
Entrepreneurship is a vital force in the economic development of societies, with small and medium-sized enterprises providing the majority of employment in many countries. For this reason, research in management and economics is interested in analyzing entrepreneurship from a macro-level perspective. However, enterprises are created and managed by people, which is why micro- and meso-level perspectives, specific to psychological research, offer valuable insights into entrepreneurship as well. We explain these three levels of analysis to demonstrate how psychology can shed light on entrepreneurship at each of them and extend these insights through multilevel investigations. We also introduce the collection of papers included in this special issue, which provides new findings from quantitative and qualitative studies representing different levels of analysis and presents new advancements in psychological measurement of entrepreneurship-related constructs.
The main purpose of this study is to develop and validate a scale for measuring work ability among entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Work Ability Scale (EWAS), consisting of eight items, was developed based on a thorough literature study and an elaborate analysis of its psychometric qualities. The factor structure, reliability, and criterion validity of the scale were examined in two studies using two separate samples (study 1 N = 2452, study 2 N = 201) of entrepreneurs in the Netherlands. Our results demonstrate that the newly developed scale is reliable, captures one factor, and shows criterion validity. As predicted, job demands uncertainty and risk, and workload, appeared to be negatively related to entrepreneurial work ability, while autonomy and personal resources were positively related to work ability. In turn, entrepreneurial work ability relates positively to entrepreneurial personal financial success and to personal fulfillment. From our empirical work, we conclude that the EWAS is a psychometrically sound instrument that can be used for further investigating determinants of entrepreneurial success within the theoretical framework of the Job Demands-Resources Model. Besides, the EWAS is a useful tool for entrepreneurs, business coaches, and institutions that want to help preserve and improve the work ability among entrepreneurs.
This study examines how young entrepreneurs utilize social media platforms in their entrepreneurial processes, focusing on the opportunities and challenges these platforms present and the psychological mechanisms that influence their experiences. Using Q methodology, the study explores young entrepreneurs' self-expression, idea and skill development, feedback reception, and the impact of social media's competitive environment. The research sample consists of 20 Turkish young entrepreneurs (aged 18-34) who actively engage in entrepreneurial activities through social media. The Q method analysis findings highlight three key factors shaping entrepreneurs' perceptions: Opportunities of Social Media, Psychological Impacts of Rivalry and Feedback, and Critical Perspective. Social media was viewed as a double-edged sword, simultaneously enabling creativity and networking while presenting challenges such as trust and psychological pressures. Gender-based differences emerged, with women emphasizing collaboration and opportunity while men focused on competition and feedback. Furthermore, the content analysis findings revealed both positive and negative perceptions, underscoring the dual role of social media as a driver of innovation and a source of stress. This study contributes to the growing literature on social media and entrepreneurship by offering a culturally contextualized understanding of how Turkish young entrepreneurs navigate the opportunities and challenges of digital platforms.
Women continue to face gender-related barriers in both accessing leadership positions and becoming entrepreneurs. For this reason, the present study focuses specifically on women in order to adapt the Testing the Obstacles to Promotion of Women to Management (TOP WOMAN) scale (Ramos et al., 2022), originally designed to measure perceived barriers to access to promotion, and to validate this adapted version - Testing the Obstacles to Women's Entrepreneurship Scale (TOWES) - in the context of entrepreneurship, using a sample of 281 Spanish women. The TOWES presents adequate psychometric properties, comprising the following six-factor structure: Motivational/Internal Barriers, Barriers related to Work-family Balance, Gender Stereotypes, Access to Influential Networks, Unequal Opportunities, and Business Culture. The six dimensions showed adequate reliability and construct, concurrent, convergent, and discriminant validity. Unlike the original scale, which consists of seven dimensions, in TOWES the barriers of Unequal Performance Appraisal and Unequal HR Practices are merged into just one. These findings support the validity and theoretical robustness of the adapted scale across different contexts. Moreover, they provide valuable insights for improving campaigns and training programs, identifying barriers to entrepreneurship among women in a specific population, developing objectives for raising awareness among female entrepreneurs, and providing job guidance for women.
Considering the societal and economic importance of creating and maintaining businesses, it is vital to gain insights into factors inducing older entrepreneurs to continue running a business. What is especially needed is an empirically grounded psychological understanding of the antecedents of the decision to continue running a business even when one could retire. Our qualitative study aimed to explore older entrepreneurs' motivations for deciding to continue operating a company after reaching retirement age. Through a thematic analysis of 50 in-depth semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs, we identified three main themes: motivation to continue, life stage resources, and life stage demands, and categorized each theme using specific codes. Based on the results, we propose an entrepreneurship continuation model explaining older entrepreneurs' decisions to continue their activity.
This study examined how entrepreneurs’ work-related negative affect—specifically anxiety and depression—relates to employees’ work engagement in small firms. Based on emotional contagion and social cognitive theories, the study investigated whether entrepreneurs’ negative affect impacts employees, thereby reducing their work engagement. The sample included 97 entrepreneurs and 852 employees from businesses in the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. Data were gathered through surveys in participants’ native languages. Multilevel modelling revealed that entrepreneurs’ anxiety and depression were negatively related to their own work engagement. Employees experiencing higher levels of anxiety and depression also showed lower work engagement. Emotional contagion was observed, as entrepreneurs’ negative affect was positively linked to employees’ corresponding emotional states. However, no direct relationship was found between entrepreneurs’ negative affect and employee work engagement. Indirect effects were identified through employees’ negative affect and entrepreneurs’ work engagement. These findings suggest that entrepreneurs may influence employee work engagement via affective contagion and role modelling. The study extends previous single-level research by demonstrating the cross-level effect of entrepreneurs’ emotional well-being on employee engagement, highlighting the psychological interdependence within small business settings.
This study investigates partner preferences, dating expectations, and teen dating violence (TDV) among Spanish and Moroccan adolescents, focusing on cultural and gender differences. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in 18 public schools located in disadvantaged, rural, suburban, and multicultural areas of southeastern Spain, with a sample of 1,002 students: 778 Spanish (77.6%) and 224 first- or second-generation Moroccan immigrant youth. The findings reveal significant cultural distinctions in relationship norms and expectations. Moroccan adolescents, particularly females, are more likely to remain single, influenced by cultural values that prioritize premarital virginity and marriage. Spanish adolescents emphasize intrinsic relationship qualities such as fidelity and communication, while Moroccan peers—especially males—place greater importance on extrinsic factors like beauty and sexuality. Moroccan females prioritize religious and cultural partner compatibility, in contrast to the relative indifference of Spaniards toward nationality and religion. Both groups exhibit high levels of TDV, with Moroccan adolescents reporting greater victimization and perpetration. Regression analyses highlight that extrinsic relationship preferences are associated with increased TDV, particularly among Moroccan adolescents, whereas intrinsic preferences are linked to lower violence among Spaniards.
Expressive flexibility, a prototypical form of regulatory flexibility, is recognized for its positive impact on social adaptation and mental health. Contextual flexibility is theoretically conceptualized as a crucial component of regulatory flexibility. Despite the link between expressive flexibility and context sensitivity, the extent to which expressive flexibility shapes the dynamic processes of context sensitivity remains insufficiently understood. This study employed a classic visual search paradigm combined with eye-tracking technology to investigate how attentional processes related to context sensitivity differ across varying levels of expressive flexibility. Sixty-five participants (52 females, average age 23.34 ± 2.13 years) with either high or low levels of expressive flexibility completed a visual search task using emotional faces as cues. The findings revealed that individuals with low expressive flexibility (LEF) exhibited delayed detection of negative cues compared to positive ones, whereas those with high expressive flexibility (HEF) showed no significant differences in processing emotional cues of different valences. Moreover, HEF participants demonstrated faster attentional orienting and less prolonged attention to emotional cues compared to their LEF counterparts. These results provide novel insights into the association between individual differences in expressive flexibility and dynamics of context sensitivity.
Intellectual aging refers to the decline of cognitive abilities due to the processes of aging. This study addresses the question, how the perceived intellectual aging (PIA) depends on age, cognitive abilities level, personality and wellbeing. The results of the analyses being performed confirmed the hypothesis that PIA can be predicted by age and cognitive abilities level, yet, somewhat surprisingly, clearly show that dimensions of wellbeing and personality are far stronger predictors. Wellbeing dimensions accounted for about 23 percent of the variance in PIA, personality dimensions for 17 percent, cognitive abilities level for 7 percent and chronological age only about 1 percent. Thus, the results of the study clearly suggest that, in the perception of intellectual aging signs, the effects of chronological age and the level of cognitive abilities are strongly overshadowed by the personality and wellbeing characteristics.
Men who score higher on internet sex addiction are more likely to objectify women. In this study, we examined whether withdrawal-motivated behaviors (e.g., seeking sexually stimulating environments after cutting off online pornography consumption) connect behaviors typical for sexual objectification with internet sex addiction symptomatology, as suggested by Roza et. all’s symptomatology chain (2023). We analyzed a network of 1,272 heterosexual men (Mage = 32.93, SDage = 9.44). The results went against our expectations - no withdrawal-motivated behaviors laid on a direct path between addictive symptomatology and objectifying behaviors. Instead, we found that frequent preoccupation with thoughts on online pornographic content and the lack of ability to limit one’s exposure to online pornography were associated with objectifying behaviors, and may, therefore, strengthen or sustain sexual objectification in sexually addicted men. Our results highlight the complexity of the relationship between sexual objectification and addictive symptomatology and provide a basis for the further causal study of this relationship.
With shifting family structures, an increasing number of children experience more than two parental figures throughout their upbringing. While existing research has predominantly focused on dyadic relationships between children and either their parents or stepparents, this study, through the lens of liminality, examines how children raised in stepfamilies perceive the fathering role of both biological fathers and stepfathers. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 adult children and mothers living in stepfamilies. All interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, which identified overarching patterns. Subsequently, interpretative phenomenological analysis was applied to the children's interviews to capture the individualized processes through which they attribute the fathering role. While children's accounts revealed their meaning-making, mothers’ interviews provided contextual insight. We identified three patterns in how children attributed fatherhood: 1) the biological father as the only father, 2) the stepfather as a father figure, and 3) no one is the father. Across all patterns, children experienced both father figures as liminal, both “both fathers and non-fathers” and “neither fathers nor non-fathers”, while still attributing the fathering role to one of them or none. It depended on factors such as the child's age and agency, emotional ties, maternal gatekeeping, and the father's investment.
Bullshit is considered a common part of interpersonal communication. People differ not only in how frequently they use bullshit but also in their ability to produce bullshit that effectively influences social impressions. In our study (N = 390), we aimed to examine predictors (verbal ability and divergent thinking) and correlates (dark triad traits) of bullshit ability and to relate the extent of this ability to its self-reported use. Additionally, we focused on the relationship between various methods of measuring bullshit (overclaiming and bullshitting frequency). Both verbal ability and divergent thinking were significant predictors of bullshit ability. Only Machiavellianism correlated positively, but weakly with bullshit ability. We did not find a statistically significant relationship between bullshit ability and bullshitting frequency, nor overclaiming and bullshitting frequency. Our results provide new insights into individual differences among bullshit producers and, for the first time, simultaneously link previously unexplored measures of bullshit: frequency and quality.
This study investigated whether memory overconfidence is predictive of fake news vulnerability when controlling for previously established predictors and whether it can be experimentally reduced (N = 395). Participants completed measures of reflexive and reflective open-minded thinking, rated news articles collected from untrustworthy sources and completed general knowledge and working memory tasks. Confidence was assessed after each trial. The control group received feedback on the time spent on the tasks, while the experimental group was informed about the number of incorrect answers and their average confidence level. Afterwards, both groups completed the rest of the general knowledge and working memory tasks, alongside the confidence assessment and then rated other fake news articles. While neither reflexive nor reflective open-minded thinking significantly predicted fake news vulnerability, memory overconfidence did. Overconfidence correcting feedback reduced overconfidence but not fake news vulnerability. These findings indicate that memory overconfidence is a robust, mutable predictor of fake news vulnerability and highlight the need for more in-depth behavioral research.
