Historical collapse of ancient states poses intriguing social-ecological questions, as well as potential applications to global change and contemporary strategies for sustainability. Five Old World case studies are developed to identify interactive inputs, triggers, and feedbacks in devolution. Collapse is multicausal and rarely abrupt. Political simplification undermines traditional structures...

We used a display change detection paradigm (Slattery, Angele, & Rayner Human Perception and Performance, 37, 1924-1938 2011) to investigate whether display change detection uses orthographic regularity and whether detection is affected by the processing difficulty of the word preceding the boundary that triggers the display change. Subjects were significantly more sensitive to display changes ...

Identity control theory researchers have found evidence for two processes of identity development (identity defense and identity change) and have theorized a third process (identity exploration). College students (N = 123) self-rated as high or low in occupational identity certainty and importance received self-discrepant feedback to induce identity disturbance, and dependent measures of identi...

In light of its role in maintaining psychological equanimity, we proposed that nostalgia--a self-relevant, social, and predominantly positive emotion--regulates avoidance and approach motivation. We advanced a model in which (a) avoidance motivation triggers nostalgia and (b) nostalgia, in turn, increases approach motivation. As a result, nostalgia counteracts the negative impact of avoidance m...

The rise of bilingual education triggers an important question: which language is preferred for a particular school activity? Our field experiment (n = 120) shows that students (aged 13-15) who process feedback in non-native English have greater self-serving bias than students who process feedback in their native Dutch. By contrast, literature on the foreign-language emotionality effect suggest...

The assessment of the impact of noise exposure on the population is a fundamental step in noise abatement. It includes the establishment of exposure-response relationships with the use of empirical studies and the setting of an exposure limit that specifies the protection level for the population and eventually triggers mitigating measures to reduce noise exposure. Exposure-response relationshi...

We investigated how psychological distance influences goal contagion (the extent to which people automatically adopt another person's goals). On the basis of construal-level theory, we predicted people would be more prone to goal contagion when primed with psychological distance (vs. closeness) because they would construe the other person's behavior in terms of its underlying goal. Alternativel...