Israel’s year-long protest calling for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s resignation created an opportunity to examine unique factors influencing sustained collective action (SCA; i.e., repeated participation in social movement action for the same cause). As little is known about how to explain such dedication, we compared a well-established set of predictors of one-time collective action (CA) with a new predictors set of SCA, focusing on collective instrumental and socio-emotional (CISE) motivations grounded in previous participation experience, to predict subsequent participation. In a unique longitudinal design, we tracked protestors over 6 weeks. Our findings showed that less emotional exhaustion, more subjective effort into participation, and a perceived closer timeframe for desired social change positively predicted SCA. This differentiates SCA from CA—moreover, as one-time CA predictors did not predict SCA, this suggests a need for a new model to explain SCA based on CISE motivations that reflect continuous goal pursuit.

A recently published article by van Heijst et al. attempted to reconcile two research approaches in the science of emotion—basic emotion theory and the theory of constructed emotion—by suggesting that the former explains emotions as bioregulatory states of the body whereas the latter explains feelings that arise from those state changes. This bifurcation of emotion into objective physical states and subjective feelings involves three misleading simplifications that fundamentally misrepresent the theory of constructed emotion and prevent progress in the science of emotion. In this article we identify these misleading simplifications and the resulting factual errors, empirical oversights, and evolutionary oversimplifications. We then discuss why such errors will continue to arise until scientists realize that the two theories are intrinsically irreconcilable. They rest on incommensurate assumptions and require different methods of evaluation. Only by directly considering these differences will these research silos in the science of emotion finally dissolve, speeding the accumulation of trustworthy scientific knowledge about emotion that is usable in the real world.

Over the past decades, we have seen a fundamentally new form of social interaction become more and more common in our everyday lives: mediated social interactions, in which we do not speak to a person face-to-face, but the interaction takes place via a video call or some other form of technology. While most people would agree that a mediated interaction is somehow different from a face-to-face interaction, we currently lack a framework for conceptualizing what exactly is different. This is especially important when studying how mediated interactions shape our understanding of others' mental states and its neural basis. To address this gap, we propose a framework that conceptualizes the impact of social presence on social interactions and their neural underpinnings along a continuum of two key dimensions: physical and temporal presence. Whereas physical presence refers to the amount of sensory information available, temporal presence refers to the synchrony with which information is available. We argue that a systematic manipulation of both dimensions is essential for our understanding of the impact of social presence on social cognition and affect. Our conceptual framework will lay ground for integrating and advancing research on this topic in social neuroscience and beyond.

People are more likely make self-destructive choices – from drug use to self-harm – in certain affective states. While this phenomenon is usually explained by affective influences on choice, here we explore an often-overlooked alternative mechanism: state-dependent learning. For example, if an approach behavior such as drinking is learned in a state of positive affect, its future value would be inflated in a congruent (positive) relative to incongruent (negative) affective state. Studies of Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer suggest that such effects reflect Pavlovian influences on behavior. Effects of naturalistically evolving affective states on learning are hard to capture in cross-sectional studies, and we tested our hypothesis in a large intensive longitudinal study where initial learning of stimuli precedes subsequent test trials by days or weeks.

This research evaluates the impact of ethnic identity on support for restorative justice (RJ) within a multiethnic society facing a longstanding conflict. Two experimental studies were conducted in the context of Jewish–Arab relations in Israel. The first (N = 446) analysed the influence of the ethnic identity of the offender, victim and participant on attitudes towards RJ. The second study (N = 560) replicated the results of the first and explored the mediating roles of malleability beliefs and attribution biases. Key findings demonstrate a pronounced ethnic bias in support for RJ, more significant in politically charged contexts than in contexts of criminal offences. Interestingly, in criminal scenarios involving an Arab offender and a Jewish victim, the expected ethnic bias was absent. Malleability beliefs entirely mediated the relationship between ethnic identity and support for RJ, while attribution biases did so only among Arab participants. These findings highlight the intricate role of ethnic identity in RJ support, suggesting the need to account for social identification in RJ frameworks.

The tendency to embrace or avoid risk varies across and within individuals, with significant consequences for mental health. Such variations are typically explained by differences in the weights given to potential gains versus potential losses. Applying this insight to real-life decisions, however, is complicated because such decisions are often based on prior learning experiences. This raises a consequential question: which cognitive process primarily determines the weighting of gains and losses – decision-making or learning?

Although over 250 million people speak Arabic as their first language, only a minuscule fraction of developmental science studies Arab children. As values are a core component of culture, understanding how values develop is key to understanding development across cultures. Little is known about young Arab children’s values. We developed an Arabic version of the Picture-Based Value Survey for Children and implemented it in a multilingual application, adapted for 5-year-olds by recording the instructions and value item captions. We then compared the results in Arabic to those from the more established Hebrew version, with Hebrew-speaking children as a comparison group. A pilot study (N = 63) provided preliminary support that the measure is working well in Arabic and Hebrew. In Study 2, four hundred 5- to 12-year-old children reported their values (50% in Arabic, 50% in Hebrew) in a preregistered study. Multidimensional scaling analyses revealed structural patterns that closely correspond to Schwartz’s (1992) theoretical structure in both languages. Replicating past findings, power values were less important than benevolence in both cultural groups, and girls ranked self-enhancement values lower than boys (but not in Hebrew speakers). We further explored age and cultural differences in value development. Value consistency increased with age in both cultures, peaking at age 9–10. Cultural comparisons revealed several differences in value importance between the two cultures and lower value consistency and coherence in Arabic-speaking children. These results establish a tool for studying value development in Arab children and, more broadly, understanding the basic motivations driving populations that were hardly studied before. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Motivation and self-regulation might be two of the most prominent and encompassing constructs in psychological research. Self-regulation refers to the processes by which people initiate, alter, and control their behavior in pursuit of their goals. Motivation refers to the question of why people pursue their goals. In this chapter, we focus on two classic theories in psychology—cognitive dissonance and motivational conflicts—through the lens of the unique interplay between self-regulation and motivation. In both theories, motivation and the regulation of internal conflict are weaved into each other, and this bond and the feedback loop it creates are the essence of the theories. We discuss internal conflicts within the framework of self-regulation to set the stage for an elaborate discussion of the cognitive dissonance and motivational conflicts theories portraying a pivotal role for both motivation and conflict resolution.

Mood can be understood as encoding the degree to which recent experiences surpassed or fell below one's learned expectations. Thus, learning likely plays a key role in shaping mood, yet empirical investigations of this are scarce. A key challenge is to disentangle within-person dynamics from trait differences in learning and mood. To overcome this challenge, our study combined EMA with a learning task performed twice a day over four weeks (8064 trials per participant) with ambulatory EEG recordings, to quantify changes in reward and punishment learning alongside changes in mood.

Understanding how our sensory apparatus generates percepts and coherent experiences of the world has been the outstanding quest of centuries. Throughout history, philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and – in the past few decades—cognitive neuroscientists have all sought answers to how our brain generates thinking and feeling, behavior, and consciousness. In this contribution, we discuss a bias that has, by and large, characterized this quest, namely a spatial approach towards understanding the neural correlates and mechanisms of cognition. In what follows, we critically assess the spatial emphasis in the study of the brain and cognitive functions. In our historical account of this emphasis, we point to tacit assumptions and limitations of this scientific approach. We also highlight moments in which the potential for incorporating time and temporal organizing principles was either overlooked or missed due to the ruling perspective. We then discuss the value and potential of integrating the temporal domain into our understanding of the brain and cognitive functions by providing examples that have finally emerged in the field.