Geänderte Inhalte

Dr. rer. nat. Dipl. Psych. Mira Preis

Across societies and across history, seemingly dominant, authoritarian leaders have emerged frequently, often rising to power based on widespread popular support. One prominent theory holds that evolved psychological mechanisms of followership regulate citizens' leadership preferences such that dominant individuals are intuitively attributed leadership qualities when followers face intergroup conflicts like war. A key hypothesis based on this theory is that followers across the world should upregulate their preferences for dominant leaders the more they perceive the present situation as conflict-ridden. From this conflict hypothesis, we generate and test four concrete predictions using a novel dataset including 5008 participants residing in 25 countries from different world regions (consisting of a mix of convenience and approximately representative country-specific samples). Specifically, we combine experimental techniques, validated psychological scales, and macro-level indicators of intergroup conflict to gauge people's preferences for dominant leadership. Across four independent tests, results broadly support the notion that the presence of intergroup conflict increases follower preferences for dominant leaders. Thus, our results provide robust cross-cultural support for the existence of an adaptive, tribal followership psychology, a finding that has various implications for understanding contemporary politics and international relations.

Our study investigates if couples with a high relationship quality judge their partner’s mental state more accurately. We examine associations between different aspects of empathic accuracy and relationship quality in the context of couples’ messenger communication. We propose a new procedure for assessing the empathic accuracy of judgments of affect and interpersonal motivational states. Using the Truth and Bias Model and the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model, data from N = 102 participants (51 couples) was analyzed to examine how empathic accuracy of different variables (affective states, e.g. valence and arousal, and interpersonal motivational states, e.g. agency and communion) are related to quality of relationship. Contrary to our pre-registered hypotheses, results do not indicate a clear positive association with relationship quality across all facets of empathic accuracy. However, empathic accuracy of affective valence was significantly associated with relationship quality, and a similar trend emerged for empathic accuracy of agentic motivational states. These findings provide some evidence for the connection of relationship quality and empathic accuracy of affective states in the context of couples’ messenger communication. Our findings underline the relevance of differentially examining affective and motivational subdomains of empathic accuracy and their outcomes. In addition, our results call for further research on empathic accuracy of agentic motivational states in couples.

Voice pitch is a salient acoustic cue that individuals use to make inferences about other’s personality. We examined how valid acoustic parameters such as mean fundamental frequency (i.e., voice pitch), variability in fundamental frequency and their dynamic changes function as indicators of dispositional extraversion in a naturalistic group discussion. We used audio data from a large-scale laboratory group study, in which unacquainted individuals interacted with each other (N = 448 with 5615 audio segments). Results suggest no compelling evidence that extraversion is associated with a lowered mean fundamental frequency (MF0), or dynamic changes in MF0 during a naturalistic interaction. If associations of extraversion with MF0 exist in naturalistic group settings, they are likely too small to be perceivable. However, in our group context, pitch variability was associated with extraversion and paralinguistic behaviour other than voice pitch, such as loudness, seems to be indicative of extraversion as well, suggesting that some paralinguistic variables may indeed signal a speaker’s levels of extraversion.