Octavia Ionescu

Université Paris-Cité

The Yellow Vests (YV) movement stands out because of its length and its unusual violent outbursts. This paper aims to better understand the emotional path underlying YVs’ intention to engage in more or less radical collective action. To this end, we opposed two models: one based on Becker and Tausch’s (2015) model of engagement in collective action...

The present research aimed to examine whether perceiving anomie within current society affects people’s representations of the national past and their support for collective actions through the reconstructed past. In two studies, we showed that perceived anomie affects people’s evaluation of some features of a past national figure (Study 1: Charles...

The present research aimed to extend the existing literature on political extremes’ symmetries and asymmetries, by examining the relationship between political extremism and perceived societal anomie (i.e., perceptions that the leadership is disregulated and that the social fabric is disintegrated) across three studies conducted within French sampl...

To date, most research has investigated people’s representations of the national past and future separately and the few that examined the relationships between the two overlooked the role of the group’s present. The present study aimed to replicate previous results showing an implicit trajectory of national decline among Americans (Yamashiro and Ro...

This manuscript has been accepted for publication in Social Psychology. Building on the social psychology literature on collective memory, we tested if national nostalgia fosters collective angst through greater perceived societal anomie among French participants. Consistent with our predictions, a correlational study (N = 535) and an experimental...

Abstract: Building on the social psychology literature on collective memory, we tested if national nostalgia fosters collective angst through greater perceived societal anomie among French participants. Consistent with our predictions, a correlational study (N = 535) and an experimental study (N = 370) showed that nostalgia for France’s past predic...

While the relationship between loneliness and psychological distress is well documented, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are less clear. One factor known to be related to loneliness as well as psychological distress, is social support, with some studies suggesting that support–both received and provided–can serve as a mechanism to reduc...

We examine how polarization within societies is associated with reduced confidence in national responses to the COVID‐19 crisis. We surveyed 4,731 participants across nine countries at Wave 1 (France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, UK and US) and then at Wave 2 (three months later) recontacted 840 participants from two cou...

We examined whether (the lack of) social support can explain why researchers have found lower rates of adherence to follow public health guidelines amongst people who perceived themselves as coming from lower social class backgrounds during the COVID-19 pandemic. To do this, we surveyed 5818 participants from 10 countries during the first wave of l...

How do global citizens respond to a global health emergency? The present research examined the association between global citizen identification and prosociality using two cross-national datasets—the World Values Survey (Study 1, N = 93,338 from 60 countries and regions) and data collected in 11 countries at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (Stud...

We examined whether people who are prone to believe COVID‐19 conspiracy theories are characterised by an especially strong concern for others or an especially strong concern for the self, and whether these orientations are associated with willingness to take a COVID‐19 vaccine. We surveyed 4,245 participants from eight nations; three months later w...