Research on placebo mechanisms has shown that expectations of patients about treatment outcome are a crucial predictor of treatment success. This holds true for both physical and mental conditions. However, in the field of mental disorders, further expectations beyond treatment outcome also play a significant role. These are disorder-related expectations (e.g., catastrophizing by patients with ...

The present research investigated the influence of knowledge about a person's modesty or arrogance on people's expectations regarding that person's emotional reactions to success and failure. Arrogance and modesty reflect the extent to which someone is likely to publicize their ability. Accordingly, we predicted that observers' expectations regarding a person's tendency to publicize their abili...

Associations among prenatal expectations, the extent to which expectations were confirmed or disconfirmed, and trajectories of marital satisfaction over the transition to parenthood were assessed 7-11 times in a sample of newlywed couples. Piecewise growth curve analyses were conducted to examine levels of marital satisfaction at the beginning of marriage and rates of change over 2 periods: fro...

We utilize a qualitative study of 33 employees in for-profit and non-profit organizations to elaborate theory on job crafting. We specifically focus on how employees at different ranks describe perceiving and adapting to challenges in the execution of job crafting. Elaborating the challenges employees perceive in job crafting and their responses to them details the adaptive action that may be n...

Past research has revealed that people have a strong tendency to respond to others' cooperative behavior with cooperation and to others' noncooperative behavior with noncooperation. Yet it is unclear whether or not this tendency still holds when people have only incomplete information about their interaction partner's past behavior. To address this question, we designed a new paradigm - a coin ...

People self-enhance in a variety of ways. For example, they generally expect to perform better than others, to be in control of events, and to have a brighter future. Might they also self-enhance by expecting to receive positive feedback in social interactions? Across five studies, we found that they did. People's desire for feedback correlated with how positive they expected it to be (Study 1)...