It’s been a good end to 2024, here are two new articles I’ve published with my students.
Firstly, this paper was published in Cognition and Emotion a few weeks back. This started as a backup project back in the pandemic: I’d just gotten funding for a psychophysiology project, and early 2020 seemed a really bad time to be sticking electrodes to 100 people’s faces in a small lab cubicle. So instead, we tried to test the veracity of probability bias with an online reading-time task. Initial results looked good, and after some back-and-forth with the reviewers, we all eventually agreed that the results were a bit inconclusive. The journal has published the work anyway, which I think is a great credit to them, the editors and reviewers.
My co-authors are Selen Gönül, who started this as a volunteer with time on her hands, and who impressed me so much I then took her on as a PhD student; and Deniz Sözügür and Khadija Khalid, who worked on the project for their Independent Study courses. They all did great work!
Booth, R. W., Gönül, S., Sözügür, B. D., & Khalid, K. (2024). A behavioural test of depression-related probability bias.
Cognition and Emotion. Advance online publication.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2024.2425695
Secondly, this paper was published in Emotion yesterday. This was actually my PROJ 201 project from Spring 2023; I came up with something a little different from what I normally do, and it turned out very well indeed! This was a pre-registered RCT of the Best Possible Self task, which is a popular intervention in the Positive Psychology literature. However, said literature was a little unclear as to whether this intervention improves positive mood, or increases optimism. We ran a large study, and it turned out the intervention does both of those things, and its effects on mood and optimism are largely independent. Intriguingly, we also found that the task improved our participants’ anxiety symptoms and one-week follow-up, which is quite a new finding, and I’m now running further trials to see if that effect is reliable.
My PROJ 201 students worked hard on preparing the materials for the study – we were the first to use the BPS task in Turkish – and they are all authors on the paper!
Booth, R. W., Erhan, K., Erkocaoğlan, O., Kuşpınar, H., & Yaldırak, K. (2024). The best possible self task has
direct effects on expectancies and mood, and an indirect effect on anxiety symptom severity. Emotion.
Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001481
