Consistent value-based decision-making is crucial for outcomes such as maintaining a healthy lifestyle or being perceived as trustworthy. The certainty of evaluations of choice options is related to the consistency of value-based decisions, but its nature is poorly understood. Here, we examined how evaluation certainty is formed through the possibly unique contributions of 'variability' and 'value-extremity' of prior experiences with objects. We conducted a preregistered 2 & times; 2 within-subject experiment (n = 188) where variability and value-extremity of experiences with objects were manipulated independently. Participants learned value-distributions for objects, estimated their mean value and rated certainty in their evaluation. As predicted, results show that variability of experiences is negatively related to certainty, independent of value-extremity. Surprisingly, we find no evidence for a positive effect of value-extremity on evaluation certainty. These results point to the possibility that the previously observed relationship between value-extremity and evaluation certainty is the result of an ecological confound between variability and value-extremity of prior experiences.

Many societal challenges, for example in the health and sustainability domain, involve human behaviour. The problem is often that unhealthy or environmentally harmful behaviours are perceived as more attractive than their healthy and pro-environmental alternatives, and that experiences with new healthy or pro-environmental behaviours are not always immediately pleasant. Here, we take a value-based decision making perspective and present a new psychological model of behaviour change. First, we adapt the existing Value-based Choice Model of self-control to better align with the behaviour change domain by, for example, mapping key concepts of this domain (e.g., attitudes, goals) onto our model. Second, whereas the endpoint of other models of behaviour change is the choice for a specific behaviour, the Value and Experience-based Model of Behaviour Change (VEM-BC) incorporates an experiential component. Specifically, it acknowledges the crucial importance of affective experiences during behaviour execution for long-term behaviour change. One central recommendation of the VEM-BC is, therefore, that interventions should aim at creating positive experiences with the desired target behaviour. By integrating insights from different research areas such as decision making, reinforcement learning, affective processing, self-control, and behaviour change, the VEM-BC offers a unified perspective and generates novel predictions for promoting lasting behaviour change.

Enabling people to reduce their consumption of unhealthy appetitive products can improve their health. Over the last decades, progress has been made by uncovering new ways to change behavior toward appetitive products without feedback incentives (e.g., reward or punishment, as in feedback-driven reinforcement learning), but instead by cueing motor responses (e.g., go vs. no go) toward these products in cognitive training tasks. However, it is unclear how this nonreinforced learning compares to reinforcement learning. Moreover, recent work on reinforcement learning has uncovered a basic learning mechanism, the action-valence asymmetry, which points to the possibility that reward and punishment learning may not always outperform learning without any external reinforcement. Here, we report two well-powered preregistered experiments (experiment 1a: N = 72; experiment 1b: N = 81) that examined when reinforcement learning outperforms nonreinforced learning in modifying people's preferences for food. Our findings show that reinforcement learning notably surpasses nonreinforced learning, but only when active responses (go) are rewarded, and inactions (no-go) are reinforced by avoiding punishments. These results shed light on interventions that combine rewards and punishments to facilitate changes in food preferences.

People hold their opinions and evaluations of objects with varying degrees of certainty. Understanding the nature of evaluation certainty is important, as it is a strong predictor of behavior. Several factors that impact certainty have been identified in past research, including value positivity, value extremity, and consistency in value-relevant evidence. However, whether these factors contribute uniquely to certainty or are statistically confounded remains unknown. The present work discusses four experiments (total N = 372) to disentangle these factors by leveraging the phenomenon of ensemble perception. We created pairs of ensembles (food baskets and retail good bundles) that are experimentally equalized on value positivity, value extremity, or evidence consistency, while systematically varying in evaluation certainty or evidence consistency. The results show independent contributions of value positivity and value extremity, but not evidence consistency, on ensemble evaluation certainty. Neither of the equalized factors fully accounts for evaluation certainty in the created ensembles, suggesting that it is a complex construct influenced by multiple independent factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Journalism professionals and media scholars frequently debate whether audiences should be exposed to graphic or sanitized imagery in news coverage. Understanding how such visuals affect viewers is key to resolving this issue. In this paper, we investigate the impact of graphic imagery on news consumers' reactions, and examine the moderating effects of prior exposure to violence, and the proximity of the event. In Study 1, Mexican and Dutch participants (N = 128) viewed either a graphic or sanitized news video about the 2019-2020 Chilean protests. In Study 2, Mexican participants (N = 375) read a news article about violence against migrants, varying in image content and event proximity. Results indicate that graphic imagery increased negative emotions and willingness to discuss and share the news but did not influence information seeking or social involvement. Prior exposure to violence and proximity did not moderate these effects. However, specific negative emotions mediated the relationship between graphicness and some outcomes. These findings provide journalists with an evidence-based foundation for making informed decisions about the use of graphic visuals. By understanding the impact of such imagery, they can more effectively evaluate which visuals to include in their reporting without overwhelming or alienating audiences.

Recognising emotional expressions is important for successful social interactions. Prior research has demonstrated that emotion recognition is influenced by evaluative associations people have with different social categories. Here, we systematically investigate whether reinforcement learning can modify social category biases in emotion recognition. Previous research has shown that reinforcement learning is a promising method for altering evaluative associations. In Experiment 1 (N = 40), we replicated that the Happy Face Advantage is influenced by social category membership. People were faster at recognising happiness as happiness than anger as anger⁠ for White - Dutch faces, while no difference was found for Moroccan - Dutch faces. In Experiments 2-3 (Ntotal = 144), we used a reinforcement learning go/no-go task, in which people learned to act to images of Moroccan - Dutch faces to obtain rewards and to not act to images of White - Dutch faces to avoid punishments before participating in the emotion recognition task. Results show that reinforcement learning influences emotion recognition. Instead of the commonly observed interaction effect between social category and expression valence (e.g. in Experiment 1 and previous work), we consistently found a main effect of valence on emotion recognition. These findings suggest that aligning (in)actions with rewards/punishments changes emotion recognition.

Safety villages are interventions that aim to boost children's knowledge and behaviour regarding risk-taking behaviours and their consequences via an experiential learning approach. In safety villages, children experience scenarios involving risks that resemble real-life situations. We investigated the extent to which desirable learning outcomes from a single-session safety village visit are visible outside the safety village context. In a well-powered quasi-experimental preregistered field study, we compared students (aged 11-13) who received experiential safety education to a control group of students who had not yet received the education on three important learning outcomes: Knowledge-application, risk-taking behaviour and general risk-taking tendencies. Data were collected outside of the safety village environment, before or after the visit, and without explicit reminders of the visit. Results show students who received experiential safety education outperformed those who did not yet receive experiential education on knowledge-application and reduced risk-taking behaviours. We found no differences on general risk-taking tendencies. These results show a single visit to a safety village visit can reduce risk-taking of risks that were experienced in the village, but not general risk-taking tendencies. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

Although social interactions are ubiquitous, people often choose not to interact with others-for example, people may choose to not greet a stranger, to not talk to a colleague at work, or to ignore a text message from a friend. Here, we systematically investigate how people's actions, inactions, and their consequences (rewards and punishments) affect impressions. In four preregistered experiments (N = 240), we used a reinforcement learning go/no-go task, in which people learned to act or not act to images of fractals/faces to obtain rewards or avoid punishments. Findings replicated the action-valence asymmetry in learning (Experiments 1-4): People more easily learned to act when acting led to the attainment of rewards (vs. the avoidance of punishments), while people learned inactions more easily when these inactions led to the avoidance of punishments (vs. the attainment of rewards). Our experiments demonstrate that these action-valence asymmetries extend to social stimuli (Experiment 2 ingroup faces; Experiment 3 outgroup faces; Experiment 4 ingroup and outgroup faces) and that they affect subsequent impressions. That is, people evaluated faces most positively when acting had previously led to the attainment of rewards; people evaluated faces most negatively when not acting had previously led to the avoidance of punishment. We discuss our findings in light of the approach-avoidance literature. This work has implications for our understanding of the role of inactions in social contexts: It shows evidence that inactions lead to less positive impressions than actions, over and above the effect of punishment signals.

Imaginal retraining (IR) is an emerging intervention technique in which people imagine avoidance behaviors towards imagined foods or other substances, such as throwing them away. Although IR shows promise in reducing initial craving for a range of substances, including alcohol and tobacco, effects appear less robust for craving for energy-dense foods. This raises the question of how IR for food craving can be improved. Here, we address this question informed by emerging findings from IR dismantling studies and the field of regular cognitive bias modification training paradigms. Based on current insights, we suggest the most optimal ‘craving-reduction’ effects for energy-dense food can likely be expected for IR that includes an overt motor movement. While it is not yet clear what movement works best for food, we suggest a tailored movement or Go/No-Go-based stop movement has the potential to be most effective. The most likely mechanism in reducing craving is cue-devaluation of trained vivid craving images regarding specific energy-dense food products. Future work is needed that investigates and assess the underlying mechanisms (e.g., updating beliefs; cue-devaluation), task characteristics (e.g., IR instructions; specific motor movements) and individual characteristics (e.g., perceived craving; vividness of food imagination) that determine IR effects.

Background: Training motor responses to food images can influence subsequent evaluations of the food and even consumption. One important question in the literature is whether training people to approach versus avoid food items is different from training people to respond (‘go’) versus not responding (‘no go’) to food items. Therefore, we systematically investigated whether action vigor, i.e., withholding responses vs. mere go responses, and motivational orientation, i.e., approach and avoidance, differentially change stimulus valence.Methods: In 73 healthy participants, we contrasted approach, avoidance, and non-responses with the same neutral go response in their potential to change food liking ratings and affective facial responses. Results: Training approach responses to stimuli increased their valence compared to merely going to stimuli as was evident from explicit liking ratings and facial corrugator activity. Unexpectedly, not responding to stimuli or avoiding stimuli did not decrease their valence relative to go stimuli. Conclusion: The current results suggest that approach responses may be more effective to increase the valence of food items than mere go responses and that Approach-Avoidance Interventions may be more effective for aims to increase consumption e.g., of healthy foods rather than for aims to reduce consumption e.g., of unhealthy foods. They further suggest that the devaluation of non-responded stimuli that is often found in the literature may not become visible in the current task set-up where the Go/No-go training is administered on a touchscreen.

BACKGROUND:Alcohol-dependent individuals tend to selectively approach alcohol cues in the environment, demonstrating an alcohol approach bias. Because approach bias modification (ApBM) training can reduce the approach bias and decrease relapse rates in alcohol-dependent patients when added to abstinence-focused treatment, it has become a part of regular treatment. Moreover, in selective inhibition (SI) training, responses to one category of stimuli (i.e., alcohol stimuli) are selectively inhibited in an adapted Go/No-Go task. SI-Training has been found to effectively devalue the inhibited category and to reduce consumption of alcohol among social drinkers. This study investigated whether SI-Training can further improve the effects of treatment as usual that includes ApBM, and if so, whether the effect is mediated by a devaluation of the inhibited alcohol stimuli.METHODS:Abstinent alcohol-dependent inpatients (N=434) were randomly assigned to receive 6 sessions of either active (n = 214, 32% female) or sham (n = 220, 38% female) SI-Training, in addition to standard treatment that includes active ApBM. Ratings were used to assess changes in the evaluation of alcohol stimuli after the training. Relapse rates were assessed 3 and 12 months after treatment discharge.RESULTS:Alcohol stimuli were rated negatively before and after the training, and the training did not influence these ratings. Evaluation of nonalcoholic drinks became more positive after active SI-Training. Both ApBM and SI-Training showed the expected training effects on reaction times. Contrary to expectations, SI-Training conditions did not yield different abstinence rates 3 or 12 months after treatment.CONCLUSIONS:We found no evidence supporting the hypothesis that SI-Training amplifies the relapse-preventing effect of ApBM. Moreover, alcohol stimuli were rated negatively before and after treatment and were not influenced by SI-Training.

Establishing behavior change toward appetitive foods can be crucial to improve people's health. Food go/no-go training (GNG), in which people respond to some food items and not to other food items depending on the presentation of a go or no-go cue, is a means to establish behavior change. GNG changes the perceived value of food items and food consumption. After GNG, no-go items are rated as less attractive than go and/or untrained items, an empirical phenomenon called the NoGo-devaluation-effect. This effect is not always found, however. One theory-based explanation for these inconsistent results may be found in the timing of the go and no-go cues, which is also inconsistent across studies. Hence, in the present work we conducted two experiments to examine the possible role of go and no-go cue presentation timing in eliciting the NoGo-devaluation-effect. In Experiment 1, we presented the food items before the presentation of go/no-go cues, whereas we reversed this order in Experiment 2. As predicted, the NoGo-devaluation-effect was obtained in Experiment 1. This effect was absent in Experiment 2. Moreover, recognition memory for stimulus-action contingencies moderated the devaluation effect in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. These results show that NoGo devaluation is dependent on the timing of the NoGo cue, which has theoretical and applied implications for understanding how and when go/no-go training influences food consumption. We propose that the value of food items is updated during go/no-go training to minimize prediction errors, and that this updating process is boosted by attention.

Consistently not responding to stimuli during go/no-go training leads to lower evaluations of these NoGo stimuli. How this NoGo-devaluation-effect can be explained has remained unclear. Here, we ran three experiments to test the hypothesis that people form stimulus-stop-associations during the training, which predict the strength of the devaluation-effect. In Experiment 1, we tried to simultaneously measure the stimulus-stop-associations and NoGo-devaluation, but we failed to find these effects. In Experiment 2, we measured NoGo-devaluation with established procedures from previous work, and stimulus-stop-associations with a novel separate task. Results revealed a clear NoGo-devaluation-effect, which remained visible across multiple rating blocks. Interestingly, this devaluation-effect disappeared when stimulus-stop-associations were measured before stimulus evaluations, and there was no evidence supporting the formation of the stimulus-stop-associations. In Experiment 3, we found evidence for the acquisition of stimulus-stop-associations using an established task from previous work, but this time we found no subsequent NoGo-devaluation-effect. The present research suggests that the NoGo-devaluation-effect and stimulus-stop-associations can be found with standard established procedures, but that these effects are very sensitive to alterations of the experimental protocol. Furthermore, we failed to find evidence for both effects within the same experimental protocol, which has important theoretical and applied implications.

Inhibitory-control training can change food consumption. Here, we review work on one specific inhibitory-control training, namely go/no-go training (GNG), with the aim of clarifying how this training changes behavior. Recent work suggests it is unlikely that GNG trains general inhibitory control or even food-specific inhibition. Instead, recent research suggests GNG changes the value of food items. These findings call for theorizing on how a training task in which people merely respond or not respond to food items without any external reinforcement can impact the value of these items. We propose the value of trained food items is updated during GNG by action and inaction decisions. This value-updating account is descriptively accurate and generates new research questions and testable hypotheses to better understand the underlying mechanisms of GNG. The account also prompts questions about how everyday NoGo decisions can stimulate moderate consumption patterns.

Objective Demanding psychosocial work characteristics, such as high job demands, can have a detrimental impact on leisure–time physical activity (LTPA), with adverse consequences for employee health and well-being. However, the mechanisms and moderators of this crossover effect are still largely unknown. We therefore aimed to identify and test potential mediating and moderating factors from within and outside the work environment. Based on the previous research, we expected job demands to be negatively related to LTPA through fatigue. In addition, we expected that job control and worktime control would attenuate the relationship between job demands and fatigue. Furthermore, we hypothesized that autonomous exercise motivation and spontaneous action planning would attenuate the relationship between fatigue and LTPA. In addition to these cross-sectional hypotheses, we expected the same effects to predict a change in LTPA in the following year. Methods To investigate these assumptions, a preregistered longitudinal survey study was conducted among a large sample of Dutch employees in sedentary jobs. Participants reported on the constructs of interest in 2017 and 2018 ( N = 1189 and 665 respectively) and the resulting data were analyzed using path analyses. Results Our cross-sectional analyses confirm a weak indirect, negative association between job demands and LTPA, via fatigue. However, this finding was not observed in our longitudinal analyses and none of the other hypotheses were confirmed. Conclusion This study shows that, among employees with relatively healthy psychosocial work characteristics (i.e., high job control), the evidence for an impact of these work characteristics on participation in LTPA is limited.

Scientific-consensus communication is among the most promising interventions to minimize the gap between experts’ and the public’s belief in scientific facts. There is, however, discussion about its effectiveness in changing consensus perceptions and beliefs about contested science topics. This preregistered meta-analysis assessed the effects of communicating the existence of scientific consensus on perceived scientific consensus and belief in scientific facts. Combining 43 experiments about climate change, genetically modified food, and vaccination, we found that a single exposure to consensus messaging had a positive effect on perceived scientific consensus (g = 0.55) and on belief in scientific facts (g = 0.12). Consensus communication yielded very similar effects for climate change and genetically modified food, whereas the low number of experiments about vaccination prevented conclusions regarding this topic. Although these effects are small, communicating scientific consensus appears to be an effective way to change factual beliefs about contested science topics.

After cognitively demanding work, individuals tend to be less physically active. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying this effect have not been thoroughly tested. The aim of this article was to experimentally investigate the impact of cognitive work demands on subsequent physical activity behavior. Across two preregistered experiments, participants were exposed to high or low levels of cognitive work demands, operationalized as workload in Experiment 1 and as working-memory load in Experiment 2. In a subsequent choice task, participants made binary consequential choices between leisure nonphysical activities (e.g., drawing) and effortful physical activities (e.g., cycling). Choice alternatives were matched on attractiveness rankings. Additionally, physical endurance performance was measured using a standardized cycling protocol in Experiment 1. In contrast to the hypotheses, after performing work with high cognitive demands, participants were not more likely to choose nonphysical over physical activities nor did they perform significantly worse on the physical endurance task. Exploratory analyses suggest that preexisting preferences for either physical or nonphysical activities explained physical activity behavior above and beyond exposure to cognitively demanding work. These experiments question the impact of cognitively demanding work on subsequent cognitive fatigue and physical activity behavior. Implications for theory, practice, and future directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Background: Training motor responses to food images can influence subsequent evaluations of the food and even consumption. One important question in the literature is whether training people to approach versus avoid food items is different from training people to respond (‘go’) versus not responding (‘no go’) to food items. Therefore, we systematically investigated whether action vigor, i.e., withholding responses vs. mere go responses, and motivational orientation, i.e., approach and avoidance, differentially change stimulus valence. Methods: In 73 healthy participants, we contrasted approach, avoidance, and non-responses with the same neutral go response in their potential to change food liking ratings and affective facial responses. Results: Training approach responses to stimuli increased their valence compared to merely going to stimuli as was evident from explicit liking ratings and facial corrugator activity. Unexpectedly, not responding to stimuli or avoiding stimuli did not decrease their valence relative to go stimuli. Conclusion: The current results suggest that approach responses may be more effective to increase the valence of food items than mere go responses and that Approach-Avoidance Interventions may be more effective for aims to increase consumption e.g., of healthy foods rather than for aims to reduce consumption e.g., of unhealthy foods. They further suggest that the devaluation of non-responded stimuli that is often found in the literature may not become visible in the current task set-up where the Go/No-go training is administered on a touchscreen.