Food loss and food waste extensively contribute to environmental degradation. Children waste large quantities of food and more research is required to better understand this problem and consequently ...to reduce food waste in the youngest generation. Here, we examined affective and behavioral components of attitudes towards food-wasting in a group of 670 children and 123 adults, aged 3–28. The participants viewed food wasting and food saving in a video, and we tested whether age affected the moral-emotional and behavioral reactions to a food wasting vs. food saving person. The attitude towards the food wasting protagonist (operationalized as “liking” indicated on a pictorial scale) was significantly more negative than that towards the food saving protagonist in all age groups except for the three- to five-year old children. Behavioral attitude towards the video protagonists was defined as a willingness to share some goods with a food wasting vs. a food saving person, and in our study, food wasting protagonist received equal amount or less resources distributed by the participants. Additionally, our data suggest that food wasting preferentially affected food sharing in adults, but not in children, as food was shared with the food wasting protagonist in significantly smaller quantities than pens by the oldest age group. In summary, we show that even preschoolers disapprove of food wasting behavior, but only in 6–7 year old children this attitude begins to become well established; it consolidates at the age of 8–9 and starts to include a behavioral component at the age of 10–12. We suggest that pro-environmental interventions targeting food waste reduction in children should start at middle childhood and focus on behavior.
•Children waste large quantities of food which contributes to environmental degradation.•We experimentally examined attitudes towards food-wasting in children and adults.•Emotional attitude towards food wasting was negative starting from 6 years of age.•Food-wasting negatively affected participants' behavioral reactions (sharing patterns).•Interventions targeting waste reduction should start at the age of 6 years and focus on behavior.
Reinstating the olfactory learning context can increase access to memory information, but it is not fully clear which memory functions are subject to an enhancing odor context reinstatement effect. ...Here, we tested whether congruent odor context during encoding and recall positively affected declarative and nondeclarative memory scores using a novel method for manipulation of an odorous environment; namely, intranasal Nosa plugs. Recall of a text and a complex figure as well as performance in a priming task were assessed immediately and 1 wk after encoding. We found that congruent odor exposure at encoding and recall aided free retrieval of a story at delayed testing but had no significant effect on a complex figure recall or a word completion task. Differences between the assessed memory indices suggest that olfactory environmental cues may be primarily efficient in free verbal recall tasks.
Variability in human olfactory sensitivity has been attributed to individual-level factors such as genetics, age, sex, medical history of infections and trauma, neurogenerative diseases, and ...emotional disorders. Scarce evidence exists on the cross-cultural variation in olfactory sensitivity. Hence, we performed 2 studies to estimate the variability in olfactory threshold as a function of location and environment. Study 1 involved 11 laboratories from 4 continents (N = 802). In each location, in a designated laboratory, approximately 80 subjects underwent olfactory sensitivity testing with custom-made tests with eucalyptol and phenylethanol (PEA) odors. Tests were based on the Threshold subtest of the Sniffin' Sticks battery. In Study 2, we compared olfactory sensitivity and suprathreshold perception of PEA and eucalyptol in 2 Chinese (N = 160) and 2 Indian (N = 92) populations-one based in their native country and the other in Germany. Both studies present large-scale evidence that olfactory sensitivity varies as a function of geographical location and suggest that environmental factors play an important role in shaping olfactory sensitivity and suprathreshold olfactory perception. We delineate further steps necessary to identify specific factors underlying uncovered variability and the relationship between olfactory sensitivity and suprathreshold odor perception.
Disgust might be elicited by various sensory channels, including the sense of smell. It has been previously demonstrated that unpleasant odors emitted by an external source are more disgusting than ...those emitted by oneself (
the source effect)
. As disgust’s main purpose is to help organisms avoid potentially dangerous, contaminating objects, individuals with visual or hearing sensory impairment (thus, with an impeded ability to detect cues indicating pathogen threat) might have developed an increased levels of olfactory disgust sensitivity (
modality compensation in disgust sensitivity)
. We set out to investigate disgust sensitivity in olfaction using the Body Odor Disgust Scale (BODS) on a large sample of 74 deaf and 98 blind participants, with comparison to control groups without sensory impairment (
N
= 199 in total). The results did not support the hypothesis of
modality compensation in disgust sensitivity
. Contrary to previous research, neither sex nor age influenced the outcomes. Evidence for
the source effect
was found. Acquired data are interpreted in the light of social desirability. The emphasis put on the olfaction by blind and deaf individuals is discussed.
During medical pandemics, protective behaviors need to be motivated by effective communication, where finding predictors of fear and perceived health is of critical importance. The varying ...trajectories of the COVID-19 pandemic in different countries afford the opportunity to assess the unique influence of 'macro-level' environmental factors and 'micro-level' psychological variables on both fear and perceived health. Here, we investigate predictors of fear and perceived health using machine learning as lockdown restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were introduced in Austria, Spain, Poland and Czech Republic. Over a seven-week period, 533 participants completed weekly self-report surveys which measured the target variables subjective fear of the virus and perceived health, in addition to potential predictive variables related to psychological factors, social factors, perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD), and economic circumstances. Viral spread, mortality and governmental responses were further included in the analysis as potential environmental predictors. Results revealed that our models could accurately predict fear of the virus (accounting for approximately 23% of the variance) using predictive factors such as worrying about shortages in food supplies and perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD), where interestingly, environmental factors such as spread of the virus and governmental restrictions did not contribute to this prediction. Furthermore, our results revealed that perceived health could be predicted using PVD, physical exercise, attachment anxiety and age as input features, albeit with smaller effect sizes. Taken together, our results emphasize the importance of 'micro-level' psychological factors, as opposed to 'macro-level' environmental factors, when predicting fear and perceived health, and offer a starting point for more extensive research on the influences of pathogen threat and governmental restrictions on the psychology of fear and health.
Due to social desirability bias, people tend to self-present themselves in the presence of others in a favorable light, which sometimes may lead to deviations from reality. This phenomenon is ...particularly pronounced when controversial or strictly norm-bounded matters are considered. Here, we tested how a presence of an attractive model—either male or female—influences people’s declarations on their sociosexual orientation—the degree of their sexual permissiveness in terms of their past behavior, attitudes toward uncommitted sex, and desire for sexual intercourse with individuals they are not in a relationship with. The participants (
N
= 244, 52% men) answered questions about their sociosexuality in solitude, or out loud with an attractive model present. The results show that both men and women declare lowered levels of their desire, but not behavior or attitude, in the presence of both male and female attractive models. A follow-up study (
N
= 188, 51% men) showed that this effect was not due to the differing conditions of responding (out loud
vs
written down). The research points out to an area of human sexuality that is prone to being falsified in research and which serves as an important factor in self-presentation.
People differ in their touch preferences and in the ways in which they touch others. People who are blind are particularly sensitive to tactile stimulation as a result of sensory compensation, and ...sense of touch can support their interpersonal communication. In the article presented here, we aimed to explore whether visual status predicts preferences for touch behaviors involving strangers; specifically, we examined touch-seeking and touch-avoidance in non-intimate interpersonal situations. Our study, whose participants comprised 43 individuals with congenital blindness, 53 individuals with adventitious blindness, and 47 sighted controls, showed that visual status does not predict touch-seeking or social touch-avoidance. We also observed similar gender differences in all participating groups, with women avoiding social touch more than men in non-intimate interpersonal situations involving strangers.
Previous literature reports robust sex differences in disgust sensitivity. A few hypotheses aimed at explaining the mechanisms behind these discrepancies were proposed, but empirical studies testing ...them remain scarce. Here, we focused on the coalitional hunting and warfare hypothesis. It suggests that contemporary sex differences in disgust sensitivity arise from different sex roles of males and females in human ancestral past. With males being more frequently engaged in pathogen-loaded circumstances of coalitional hunting and war-faring, it would be adaptive for them to decrease their sensitivity to disgust in the context of such activities. In order to activate their hunting and warfare schemas, 627 participants (50.2% female) recruited via snowball sampling method were exposed to videos depicting (a) coalitional close-distance combat, (b) coalitional hunt, or (c) people in a cooperative yet nonhostile context. The results did not support the coalitional hunting and warfare hypothesis, with video clips having no impact on declared disgust sensitivity levels. Sex differences in all disgust aspects were found, along with positive relationship of emotional arousal and experienced stress with disgust sensitivity. Conversely, frequent exposition to violent movies or brutal video games was linked with lower sensitivity to disgust, thus showing a pattern in line with the tested hypothesis’ predictions. Alternative approaches to coalitional hunting and warfare hypothesis are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
According to the food preparation hypothesis, sex differences in disgust sensitivity may stem from different sex roles that males and females played in our ancestral times. In current times, these ...differences may be reflected in varying levels of disgust sensitivity between people who frequently versus rarely engage in meal preparation, or who are versus are not professionally responsible for providing meals for others. To test this reasoning, we conducted a preregistered study with 493 individuals (55% female), with 280 of them working in the restaurant industry. Participants reported their weekly time spent on cooking-related activities and completed the Food Disgust Scale and pathogen subscale of Three Domain Disgust Scale. These measures capture specific, food-related disgust sensitivity, and generalised pathogen disgust sensitivity, respectively. We found that while time spent on cooking was not associated with disgust sensitivity, people professionally engaged in food preparation displayed higher levels of food-related disgust sensitivity. There was no effect of cooking on the generalised pathogen disgust sensitivity. Additionally, we observed sex differences in both types of disgust sensitivity and found that vegetarians exhibited lower disgust sensitivity than meat-eaters. Overall, our findings offer preliminary support for the food preparation hypothesis, and point out that the mechanisms adjusting our disgust sensitivity levels are category-specific, even within the broader pathogen disgust domain.
This study tested intuitions about ownership in children of Dani people, an indigenous Papuan society (N = 79, M
= 7, 49.4% females). The results show that similar to studies with children from ...Western societies, children infer ownership from (1) control of permission, (2) ownership of the territory the object is located in, and (3) manmade versus natural origins of the object. By contrast, they did not (4) infer ownership from the first observed possession of an object. Additionally, Papuan children showed (5) an absolute first possession heuristic, whereby they assigned ownership to a person who achieved a goal, in contrast to a person who was first to pursue this goal but failed to be the first to claim it.
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