We examined how individual differences in masculine honor beliefs (MHBs) related to third-person perceptions of revenge pornography (i.e., a man distributing nude photos of his ex-girlfriend) in response to a break-up. Consistent with our hypotheses, higher levels of MHBs were associated with higher ratings of the woman as negative, higher levels of victim-blaming the woman, and higher ratings of revenge pornography as justified. Furthermore, participants perceived the woman as more at fault, and the man\'s behavior as more justified, when she cheated on him prior to his revenge (compared to when she did not cheat). Overall, our results suggest that both higher levels of MHBs and instances of infidelity inspire beliefs that disempower women victims. Our research extends our understanding of how MHBs and situational factors relate to perceptions of revenge pornography, including its justification and the stigmatization of its victims.

BACKGROUND: The reactive aggressive behavior in individuals typically shows a rapid growth trend as individuals enter adolescence, and peaks during middle-school period. According to the Comprehensive Cognitive Model of Trait Anger, trait anger and hostile attribution bias play important roles in the development of reactive aggressive behavior. Based on this, current study explored the relationship between trait anger and reactive aggressive behavior in middle school students, as well as the mediating role of hostile attribution bias and interventions.
METHODS: The current study consisted of three sub-studies. Study 1 recruited 87 middle school students with an average age of 12.367 ± 0.889 years, investigated the relationship between trait anger and reactive aggressive behavior, as well as the mediating role of trait hostile attribution bias. Study 2 recruited 62 middle school students with an average age of 13.376 ± 0.963 years, investigated the relationship between trait anger and reactive aggressive behavior, as well as the mediating role of state hostile attribution bias. Study 3 recruited 80 middle school students with an average age of 13.392 ± 0.977 years, implemented an intervention targeting trait hostile attribution bias in middle school students with high trait anger to reduce their reactive aggressive behavior. In current study, data management was performed using SPSS 22.0. Descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test, paired samples t-test, repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), and path analysis were used for statistical analysis.
RESULTS: The results of Study 1 showed that trait anger predicted reactive aggressive behavior through trait hostile attribution bias. The results of Study 2 indicated that trait and state hostile attribution bias played mediating role intermediary, and trait hostile attribution bias had a stronger mediating effect than state hostile attribution bias. The results of Study 3 suggested that the intervention effectively decreased trait hostile attribution bias and reactive aggressive behavior.
CONCLUSIONS: Trait anger can predict the reactive aggressive behavior of junior high school students, with trait hostility attribution bias and state hostility attribution bias mediating this relationship. Intervening in the hostility attribution bias of high-anger junior high school students can effectively reduce their reactive aggressive behavior.

Aggression is one of the public social issues affecting campus harmony and stability, and social exclusion is an important interpersonal contextual factor among many factors affecting aggression. However, studies examining the influence of social exclusion on aggression and its mediating mechanism are not systematic enough. Based on the general aggression model (GAM), we intend to explore the role of hostile attribution bias (HAB) in both trait and state levels of social exclusion, which leads to aggression through a combination of questionnaire and experimental methods. Study 1 surveyed 388 current high school students (Mage = 16.09, SD = 1.01) and found that HAB mediates the relationship between long-term social exclusion (trait level) and aggression tendency. Study 2 experimented with 181 high school students (Mage = 16.95, SD = 1.13) to examine whether short-term social exclusion (state level) after initiating the Cyberball paradigm could still influence aggressive behavior through the mediating role of HAB. Results found that the mediating role of HAB still holds. The findings of the study further enrich the GAM and have important implications for a more targeted approach to aggression prevention and intervention.

In their seminal experiment in 1944, Heider and Simmel revealed that humans have a pronounced tendency to impose narrative meaning even in the presence of simple animations of geometric shapes. Despite the shapes having no discernible features or emotions, participants attributed strong social context, meaningful interactions, and even emotions to them. This experiment, run on traditional 2D displays has since had a significant impact on fields ranging from psychology to narrative storytelling. Virtual Reality (VR), on the other hand, offers a significantly new viewing paradigm, a fundamentally different type of experience with the potential to enhance presence, engagement and immersion. In this work, we explore and analyze to what extent the findings of the original experiment by Heider and Simmel carry over into a VR setting. We replicate such experiment in both traditional 2D displays and with a head mounted display (HMD) in VR, and use both subjective (questionnaire-based) and objective (eye-tracking) metrics to record the observers\' visual behavior. We perform a thorough analysis of this data, and propose novel metrics for assessing the observers\' visual behavior. Our questionnaire-based results suggest that participants who viewed the animation through a VR headset developed stronger emotional connections with the geometric shapes than those who viewed it on a traditional 2D screen. Additionally, the analysis of our eye-tracking data indicates that participants who watched the animation in VR exhibited fewer shifts in gaze, suggesting greater engagement with the action. However, we did not find evidence of differences in how subjects perceived the roles of the shapes, with both groups interpreting the animation\'s plot at the same level of accuracy. Our findings may have important implications for future psychological research using VR, especially regarding our understanding of social cognition and emotions.

People\'s emotional states are influenced not just by events occurring in the present but also by how events have unfolded in the past and how they are likely to unfold in the future. To what extent do young children understand the ways in which past events can affect current emotions even if they are no longer ongoing? In the current study, we explored children\'s ability to understand how others feel at the cessation of events-as events change from being present to being past. We asked 97 4- to 6-year-olds (40.2% female) and 35 adults (54.3% female) to judge how characters felt once particular types of events had ended relative to how they felt during these events. We found that from age 4, children judged (as adults do) that the character would feel positive at the cessation of negative events-what we refer to as temporal relief. This understanding of relief occurs earlier than has been shown in previous research. However, children were less likely than adults to judge others as feeling sad at the cessation of positive events-what we refer to as temporal disappointment. Overall, our findings suggest that children not only understand that the cessation of events can affect others\' emotions but also recognize that people feel differently following the cessation of positive, negative, and neutral events.

Malicious online trolling is prevalent among Chinese college students and has recently garnered extensive attention from researchers due to the substantial harm it causes to the victims and the damage it inflicts on the online environment. Most previous studies have focused on examining how personal traits related to malicious online trolling. Further comprehensive research is needed to explore the mechanisms linking external environmental factors (antisocial media exposure) and malicious online trolling. A total of 1259 Chinese college students completed questionnaires regarding malicious online trolling, antisocial media exposure, hostile attribution bias, and empathy. The results indicated a positive association between antisocial media exposure and malicious online trolling among Chinese college students, with hostile attribution bias serving as a mediating factor. Furthermore, the direct and mediated paths between antisocial media exposure and malicious online trolling were moderated by empathy. Specifically, as the level of empathy increased among college students, the relations between the variables all weakened. Excessive exposure to antisocial media content among college students may trigger hostile attribution bias and lead to more malicious online trolling behavior. However, the relation between antisocial media exposure and malicious online trolling, hostile attribution bias and malicious online trolling, was attenuated when college students\' empathy levels were high.

Informal caregivers, who provide unpaid care work to individuals with disabilities, are devalued despite their important contributions to society. Identifying the factors contributing to their devaluation is crucial for recognizing and valuing their work. In two experimental studies, we examined (a) whether informal caregivers are dehumanized; (b) the moderating impact of belief in a just world (BJW) on this process; and (c) the predictive impact of BJW and the dehumanization of informal caregivers on the perception of informal caregivers\' suffering. In Study 1 (N = 180), a 2 (informal caregiver vs. non-caregiver) X 2 (female vs. male) between-participants design was used; in Study 2 (N = 205), there were two experimental conditions: female informal caregiver vs. male informal caregiver. Participants were randomly assigned to one description of a target and were asked to complete measures assessing the dehumanization of the target (Studies 1 and 2), the perception of the suffering of the target (Study 2), and a measure of BJW referring to themselves (Study 2). Results showed the expected dehumanization effect, such that participants attributed fewer uniquely human emotions to informal caregivers compared to non-caregivers, regardless of their gender (Studies 1 and 2). However, this effect was observed only among participants with higher BJW (Study 2). Furthermore, BJW and the dehumanization of informal caregivers predicted the minimization of the perception of informal caregivers\' suffering (Study 2). These results establish a theoretical relationship between these research areas and offer insights for practical implications and future research.

This paper examines how humans judge the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) to evaluate human attributes, specifically focusing on two key dimensions of human social evaluation: morality and competence. Furthermore, it investigates the impact of exposure to advanced Large Language Models on these perceptions. In three studies (combined N = 200), we tested the hypothesis that people will find it less plausible that AI is capable of judging the morality conveyed by a behavior compared to judging its competence. Participants estimated the plausibility of AI origin for a set of written impressions of positive and negative behaviors related to morality and competence. Studies 1 and 3 supported our hypothesis that people would be more inclined to attribute AI origin to competence-related impressions compared to morality-related ones. In Study 2, we found this effect only for impressions of positive behaviors. Additional exploratory analyses clarified that the differentiation between the AI origin of competence and morality judgments persisted throughout the first half year after the public launch of popular AI chatbot (i.e., ChatGPT) and could not be explained by participants\' general attitudes toward AI, or the actual source of the impressions (i.e., AI or human). These findings suggest an enduring belief that AI is less adept at assessing the morality compared to the competence of human behavior, even as AI capabilities continued to advance.

Learning how others perceive us helps us tune our behavior to form adaptive relationships. But which perceptions stick with us? And when in the learning process are they codified in memory? We leveraged a popular television series-The Office-to answer these questions. Prior to their functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session, viewers of The Office reported which characters they identified with, as well as which characters they perceived another person (i.e. counterpart) was similar to. During their fMRI scan, participants found out which characters other people thought they and the counterpart were like, and also completed rest scans. Participants remembered more feedback inconsistent with their self-views (vs. views of the counterpart). Although neural activity while encoding self-inconsistent feedback did not meaningfully predict memory, returning to the inconsistent self feedback during subsequent rest did. During rest, participants reinstated neural patterns engaged while receiving self-inconsistent feedback in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC). DMPFC reinstatement also quadratically predicted self-inconsistent memory, with too few or too many reinstatements compromising memory performance. Processing social feedback during rest may impact how we remember and integrate the feedback, especially when it contradicts our self-views.

Misophonia is commonly classified by intense emotional reactions to common everyday sounds. The condition has an impact both on the mental health of its sufferers and societally. As yet, formal models on the basis of misophonia are in their infancy. Based on developing behavioural and neuroscientific research we are gaining a growing understanding of the phenomenology and empirical findings in misophonia, such as the importance of context, types of coping strategies used and the activation of particular brain regions. In this article, we argue for a model of misophonia that includes not only the sound but also the context within which sound is perceived and the emotional reaction triggered. We review the current behavioural and neuroimaging literature, which lends support to this idea. Based on the current evidence, we propose that misophonia should be understood within the broader context of social perception and cognition, and not restricted within the narrow domain of being a disorder of auditory processing. We discuss the evidence in support of this hypothesis, as well as the implications for potential treatment approaches. This article is part of the theme issue \'Sensing and feeling: an integrative approach to sensory processing and emotional experience\'.