Anthony Darcy Gibson Marks

University of New England (Australia) | UNE · School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences

The rapid expansion of coal seam gas (CSG) extraction across Australia has polarized public opinion about the risks, benefits, and the future of the industry. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment to assess the impact of CSG messaging on opposition to the CSG industry. Residents of a major Australian city (N = 549), aged between 21 and 87...

Although belief in paranormal phenomena has long been studied as if it were a psychological trait, many commentators recently have preferred to define beliefs as a psychological state. Somewhat surprisingly, the psychometric decomposition of a belief into state and trait components has yet to be undertaken. To this end a sample of 239 American adul...

This study examined whether self-compassion may regulate the effects of implicit cognitions (automatic and preconscious responses) on the subjective well-being of Australian adults (N = 132). As hypothesized, self-compassion moderated the predictive effects of 2 implicit cognitions (positive attention bias and implicit self-esteem) on 2 indicators...

This study investigated the mediating role of emotional intelligence in the relationship between adult insecure attachment and subjective ill health. A sample of 343 Australian adults, aged between 18 and 77 years, completed measures of attachment, emotional intelligence and four facets of subjective health: somatic, anxiety/insomnia, social dysfun...

The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a Chinese-Mandarin version of the revised new ecological paradigm (NEP-R) scale. In a sample of 515 Mandarin-speaking Chinese nationals, we first assessed the factor structure and internal consistency of the NEP-R and assessed its validity by examining associations with global warming risk perce...

The experience of environmental stress and attitudes towards climate change was explored for 1226 students at the University of the South Pacific, the foremost tertiary institution serving the independent nations of the Pacific. Students sourced information regarding climate change from media including television, radio, and newspapers; the communi...

In this study we employed the Extended Parallel Process Model of risk communication to investigate the effectiveness of combining threat and efficacy messages to increase public engagement with climate change. A total of 515 Mandarin-speaking residents of Beijing, China were randomly assigned to view one of two climate change messages sourced from...

Surveys are becoming an increasingly popular research tool in environmental psychology. This chapter provides a practical step-by-step guide for designing and administering surveys, highlighting best practice and potential pitfalls associated with item development, response scales, sampling, and various modes of administration. General advice about...

Many people perceive climate change as psychologically distant-a set of uncertain events that might occur far in the future, impacting distant places and affecting people dissimilar to themselves. In this study, we employed construal level theory to investigate whether a climate change communication intervention could increase public engagement by...

A sample of 1226 students at the University of the South Pacific, the premier tertiary institution in the Pacific Islands, answered a range of questions intended to understand future island decision-makers’ attitudes towards Nature and concern about climate change. Questions asking about church attendance show that the vast majority of participants...

This meta-analysis examined whether tendencies to use reflective and intuitive thinking styles predicted decision performance (normatively correct responding) and decision experience (e.g., speed, enjoyment) on a range of decision-making tasks. A pooled sample of 17,704 participants (Mage = 25 years) from 89 samples produced small but significant w...

We investigated the association between cultural worldviews and climate change risk perceptions, support for climate friendly policies and climate change mitigation behaviours in a large Chinese sample. Items from Dake's cultural theory scales and Kahan's cultural cognition scale were presented to a Qualtrics online panel consisting of 515 Mandarin...

Previous studies have often revealed differences between the acknowledgment of same-sex attraction and rates of bisexual or homosexual identification. This study contends that social influences (including the perception that same-sex sexual attraction is not gender normative) as well as prejudice toward bisexual persons (biphobia), may help explain...

Self-report measures of empathy and emotional intelligence have frequently revealed significant gender differences, with females typically scoring higher than males on these dimensions. In this study, we investigated whether, in line with a social identity approach, manipulating the gender normativity of empathy and emotional intelligence would ame...

Research Findings: Emotional and social competence are critical to a child’s current and future well-being. A. D. Paterson et al. (2012) studied a sample of mothers and proposed that an adult’s approach to the socialization of a child’s emotions can be summarized in his or her parenting style as measured by the Emotion-Related Parenting Styles (ERP...

Genetic and environmental contributions to preferences for rational and experiential thinking were examined in 100 pairs of monozygotic and 73 pairs of same-sex dizygotic Australian twins. Univariate analyses for experiential thinking and working memory capacity (WMC) revealed genetic effects accounted for 44% and 39% of the variability respectivel...

This study applied the affect heuristic model to investigate key psychological factors (affective associations, perceived benefits and costs of wood heating) contributing to public support for three distinct types of wood smoke mitigation policies: education, incentives, and regulation. The sample comprised 265 residents of Armidale, an Australian...

This study investigated whether working memory capacity (WMC) moderated the relationship between physiological arousal and sexual decision making. A total of 59 men viewed 20 consensual and 20 non-consensual images of heterosexual interaction while their physiological arousal levels were recorded using skin conductance response. Participants also c...

Male sexual dysfunction is a prevalent and distressing condition, which may be exacerbated by the sufferer's perceptions of masculinity and normative sexual behavior. This study sought to investigate the effect of social context on males' beliefs regarding sexual behavior. The research examined the effect of male role modeling and masculine cues on...

This research aimed to provide practical information about how to design communications on climate change adaptation and target these to the Australian population. This was achieved by: (1) identifying and increasing awareness of different climate change audiences in Australia, and (2) evaluating how each audience responds to different types of cli...

This paper reports the psychometric development of new measure of paranormal and related beliefs. Based on a constructive review of the limitations of current self-report questionnaires several criteria were formulated for development of the new measure. One of the key criteria was that items had to meet an explicit definition of scientifically una...

The purpose of this research was to examine how affective associations with smoking and outcome expectancies regarding smoking are related to smoking status and intention to quit among smokers. Researchers and practitioners can draw on findings regarding affective associations and outcome expectancies to provide a further basis for smoking preventi...

Background: There is evidence that individuals perform better on some memory tasks when tested at their preferred time of day, a phenomenon named the synchrony effect. There is also evidence of a predictable change from evening to morning preference during the adult life span. Together, these findings suggest that age effects on memory measures ma...

This study of adults (n = 269) and adolescents (n = 308) applied latent profile analysis to preference for rational and/or experiential cognition, coupled with working memory capacity (WMC). A 4-profile solution comprising rationally dominant, experientially dominant, dual preference, and disengaged groups was retained for both adult and adolescent...

This study examined the role of outcome expectancies in explaining sex differences in adolescents' inclination to engage in acts of aggression. Using a sample of Australian adolescents, 2 scales were developed to measure outcome expectancies of direct and indirect aggression. The data were used in subsequent mediation analyses. Sex differences in d...

This study describes a field experiment assessing the effectiveness of education and technological innovation in reducing air pollution generated by domestic wood heaters. Two-hundred and twenty four households from a small regional center in Australia were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: (1) Education only e households re...

This article describes an experiment designed to explore the effects of 'priming' (i.e. being exposed to a suggested interpretation of an audio signal) on how juries perceive disputed utterances in poor quality recordings used as evidence in legal cases. Using the actual disputed utterance from a real case, the experiment tracked how participants'...

Human decision-making is thought to involve the interplay of two distinct information processing systems: a rational (logical) system and an experiential (intuitive) system (Epstein, 1994). Moreover, the ability to engage in rational processing is believed to be constrained by working memory capacity (WMC) (Feldman Barrett, Tugade, & Engle, 2004)....

This study assessed the factor structure, internal consistency, and concurrent validity of a revised instrument, the Composite Codependency Scale (CCS), a 19-item measure designed to assess codependent traits. Exploratory factor analysis of the CCS, using data from 301 adults from the general population and 49 attending members of Codependents Anon...

This study examined the moderating effects of dispositional rumination and mindfulness on the relationship between recent life hassles and adolescent mental health (operationalized as symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress). Data collected from a sample of 317 Australian high school students comprised an inventory of recent life hassles, measur...

Based on the analysis of cognitive style, this study demonstrated that women experiencing postnatal depression (PND) fall into two categories: (a) those with a general cognitive vulnerability to depression and for whom childbirth is a non-specific stressor; and, (b) those whose depression is directly related to the stressful demands of motherhood....

This study investigated the roles of the affect heuristic and outcome beliefs in explaining the relationship between negative urgency and adolescent binge drinking behaviour. The sample consisted of 391 Australian high school students, who were selected to be low or high on urgency. We hypothesised that highly urgent adolescents would be more likel...

This study applied Cognitive Experiential Self Theory to investigate the role of smoking expectancies and experiential associations with cigarette use in predicting smoking cessation in a sample of 155 Australian adults. Two discrete changes in the cessation process were investigated. The first involved a cognitive transition from not intending to...

This study assessed the factor structure, internal consistency, concurrent and predictive validity of the perceived vulnerability scale (PVS), a new 22-item measure designed to assess individual differences in perceived vulnerability to aging-related outcomes in older adults. It also investigated the extent to which two types of existential beliefs...

This study examined the role of affect, smoking expectancies and mode of cognition in predicting cigarette use in a sample of 185 Australian adults. Mediation analysis indicated that the relationship between respondents’ affective associations about smoking and their cigarette use was partially mediated by smoking expectancies. The present results...

This study assessed the factor structure, internal consistency, and concurrent validity of a new instrument, the rational–experiential inventory for adolescents (REI-A), a 20-item measure designed to assess individual differences in preference for rational and experiential cognition in adolescent populations. Data from 306 Australian high school st...

This study assessed the factor structure, internal consistency, and concurrent validity of the Smoking Expectancies Scale for Adolescents (SESA) using 717 Australian adolescents (87% nonsmokers, 11% current smokers, and 2% ex-smokers). Exploratory factor analysis of SESA yielded 8 factors. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the 8-factor mo...

This study examined the role of affect and risk perceptions in maintaining wood burning behavior in 256 residents of a small Australian city characterized by high levels of winter wood smoke pollution. Our analyses revealed that users of wood heaters, relative to non-users, had more positive affective associations with wood heating, perceived fewer...