Ulrich S Tran

University of Vienna | UniWien · Department of Cognition Emotion and Methods in Psychology

Background Physical activity is a health-relevant lifestyle factor associated with various benefits on physical and mental health. Several meta-analyses indicated effects of acute and chronic physical activities on elementary cognitive functions such as executive control processes, memory, and attention. Meta-analytic evidence on the effects of phy...

Significance Communicating in ways that motivate engagement in social distancing remains a critical global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study tested motivational qualities of messages about social distancing (those that promoted choice and agency vs. those that were forceful and shaming) in 25,718 people in 89 countries...

Art, as a prestigious cultural commodity, concerns aesthetic and monetary values, personal tastes, and social reputation in various social contexts-all of which are reflected in choices concerning our liking, or in other contexts, our actual willingness-to-pay for artworks. But, how do these different aspects interact in regard to the concept of so...

Men convicted of rape are a heterogenous group among individuals with sexual offending history. This may contribute to the difficulty of establishing adequate treatment during institutionalization and preventing recidivism after release. Therefore, we aimed to identify an empirical typology of individuals convicted of rape based on (a) common crimi...

Background There is strong evidence that suicides increase after media stories about suicides by celebrities, particularly those that highlight the suicide method (the Werther effect). Much less is known about the Papageno effect—the protective effects of media stories of hope and recovery from suicidal crises. A synthesis of the retrievable eviden...

Objective To assess changes in daily call volumes to the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and in suicides during periods of wide scale public attention to the song “1-800-273-8255” by American hip hop artist Logic. Design Time series analysis. Setting United States, 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2018. Participants Total US population. Lif...

Exposure to natural environments has been shown to be associated with more positive body image, but much of the existing research is limited to Western European nations and little is known about the robustness of these associations in other national contexts. In this protocol paper, we present a conceptual model of the direct and indirect associati...

A pre-performance routine (PPR) refers to a set of task-relevant thoughts and actions an athlete systematically engages in prior to performance execution. The aim of this meta-analysis was to determine the effectiveness of the PPR intervention to facilitate sport performance. The meta-analysis included 112 effect sizes from pre–post and experimenta...

According to family systems theory, a family is regarded as an organized whole and relations within this system are interconnected. However, it is not clear to date whether the interparental and the sibling relationship are associated and, if such an association exists, whether it is positive or negative. Previous findings on the associations betwe...

A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Vulnerable narcissism Dark factor of personality Item-level confirmatory factor analysis Cross-validation sampling approach Dark triad Leadership narcissism A B S T R A C T Research on socially aversive personality traits has increasingly been concerned with establishing common elements between these constructs and r...

Although distributional inequality and concentration are important statistical concepts in many research fields (including economics, political and social science, information theory, and biology and ecology), they rarely are considered in psychological science. This practical primer familiarizes with the concepts of statistical inequality and conc...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

This study set out to elucidate the complex suite of associations between the Dark Triad personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy), emotional intelligence, empathy, and cyberbullying, as the respective findings regarding this topic have been inconsistent. Studies preponderantly have relied on abbreviated Dark Triad measures...

Background Guidelines to encourage responsible reporting of suicide in news media are a key component of suicide prevention strategies. Recent guidelines have been developed on portrayal of suicide in entertainment media although the relationship between these portrayals and subsequent suicidal behaviour has received considerably less attention in...

For a quarter of a century researchers investigating the origins of sexual orientation have largely ascribed to the fraternal birth order effect (FBOE) as a fact, holding that older brothers increase the odds of homosexual orientation among men through an immunoreactivity process. Here, we triangulate the empirical foundations of the FBOE from thre...

The study of mental health literacy is well-developed, but the basic methodology used in this research (i.e., the use of text-based vignettes) has not changed substantively in over two decades of work. Here, we developed novel filmed disclosures to reassess mental health literacy of depression in a preregistered study utilising a randomised, fully...

Objective The U.S. suicide rate has increased 35% since 1999. The role of the Internet has not been thoroughly investigated despite Internet use more than doubling from 1999 to present. The majority of U.S. suicide deaths are by firearm; however, there is no examination of the association between trends in firearm Internet searches and overall and...

Objective The suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, two major American icons, in a span of days in June 2018 represent a unique and tragic natural experiment to characterize associations with actual suicides in the aftermath of celebrity suicides. The aim of this study was to identify changes in suicide counts after their deaths. Methods Su...

Objectives This study investigated whether common factors underlie the established mindfulness facets, as assessed by the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and some of the mechanisms, which have been previously proposed to explain the beneficial effects of mindfulness on mental health.Methods Multigroup exploratory structural equation mod...

Media stories featuring stories of personal experiences of coping with suicidal ideation have been shown to decrease suicide risk, but it is unclear whether more impersonal awareness materials have similar effects. This study aimed to test the impact of impersonal educative news articles featuring interviews with suicide prevention experts. Because...

Objectives The goal of the current study was to investigate the universality of the five-factor model of mindfulness and the measurement equivalence of the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ).Methods The study used FFMQ data from published and unpublished research conducted in 16 countries (total N = 8541). Using CFA, different models, prop...

Dispositional mindfulness (i.e., its trait-like and universal component) and the Big Five personality dimensions empirically overlap on both the aggregate and facet levels. This overlap is strongest for neuroticism and conscientiousness, two major correlates of mental health. Associations of dispositional mindfulness with mental health could thus b...

The associations of individualistic versus collectivistic value orientations with suicidal ideation and attempts, attitudes towards suicide and towards suicidal individuals, and psychological distress were investigated across 12 nations (N = 5572 university students). We expected differential associations of value orientations with suicidal behavio...

Objective To examine the association between reporting on suicides, especially deaths of celebrities by suicide, and subsequent suicides in the general population. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data sources PubMed/Medline, PsychInfo, Scopus, Web of Science, Embase, and Google Scholar, searched up to September 2019. Review methods S...

Currently, dedicated graphical displays to depict study-level statistical power in the context of meta-analysis are unavailable. Here, we introduce the sunset (power-enhanced) funnel plot to visualize this relevant information for assessing the credibility, or evidential value, of a set of studies. The sunset funnel plot highlights the statistical...

Background: Data-visualization methods are essential to explore and communicate meta-analytic data and results. With a large number of novel graphs proposed quite recently, a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of available graphing options for meta-analysis is unavailable. Methods: We applied a multi-tiered search strategy to find the meta-analy...

The Breast Size Satisfaction Survey (BSSS) was established to assess women’s breast size dissatisfaction and breasted experiences from a cross-national perspective. A total of 18,541 women were recruited from 61 research sites across 40 nations and completed measures of current-ideal breast size discrepancy, as well as measures of theorised anteced...

Academic dishonesty—the inclination to cheat, fabricate, falsify, and plagiarize in an academic context—is a highly prevalent problem with dire consequences for society. The present meta-analysis systematically examined associations between academic dishonesty and personality traits of the Big Five, the HEXACO model, Machiavellianism, narcissism, s...

Recent metascience investigations of the N-pact factor (NF; median sample size of studies published in a journal) have revealed NFs of merely about 100 in fields like social, sport, and exercise psychology. Journal NF has also been shown to correlate negatively with journal impact factors (JIF), implying that smaller studies appear in more prestigi...

Health-promoting and health-endangering humor styles as measured with the Humor Styles Questionnaire havebeen repeatedly associated with personality traits. Yet, a comprehensive meta-analysis of all currently availablestudies on this topic as well as an exploration of the highly heterogeneous effect sizes found in this literature isstill missing. W...

A growing body of evidence suggests that inconsistent hand preference is indicative of an increased disposition to update one’s beliefs upon exposure to novel information. This is attributed to a facilitated exchange of information between the two brain hemispheres among inconsistent handers, compared to consistent handers. Currently available stud...

Objective “13 Reasons Why,” a Netflix series, included a controversial depiction of suicide that has raised fears about possible contagion. Studies of youth suicide in the United States found an increase on the order of 10% following release of the show, but this has not been replicated in other countries. This study aims to begin to address that g...

Background Till et al. (2016) reported that in an Austrian sample approximately one in ten respondents incorrectly believed that Austria still practices, or recently practiced, the death penalty, and that there is a positive association between the amount of weekly television viewing and this gross misperception of the Austrian justice system.Metho...

Non-right-handedness appears to be more common among bisexuals and homosexuals than among heterosexuals, which might be indirect evidence of effects of prenatal androgen exposure. Current data suggest higher prenatal testosterone levels among bisexual and homosexual women, but are inconclusive for men. This study examined the association between se...

Importance On March 31, 2017, Netflix released the show 13 Reasons Why, sparking immediate criticism from suicide prevention organizations for not following media recommendations for responsible suicide portrayal and for possible suicide contagion by media. To date, little research has been conducted into the associations between the show and suici...

Previous studies suggest that personality and individual difference traits are associated with aesthetic preferences, but have infrequently examined associations within specific genres or across media domains. We examined associations between the Big Five personality traits with preferences (i.e., liking) for two non-conventional genres of film and...

Previous research among experienced meditators suggests that the associations of trait mindfulness with mental health are mediated by emotion regulation, body awareness, and a less static perspective of the self. The present study sought to elucidate whether this mediational model is also applicable to the general population and whether further pot...

The purpose of this study was to determine the associations between religion, suicidal behavior, attitudes and psychological distress in 5572 students from 12 countries by means of a self-report questionnaire. Our results showed that an affiliation with Islam was associated with reduced risk for suicide ideation, however affiliating with Orthodox C...

The funnel plot is widely used in meta-analyses to assess potential publication bias. However, experimental evidence suggests that informal, mere visual, inspection of funnel plots is frequently prone to incorrect conclusions, and formal statistical tests (Egger regression and others) entirely focus on funnel plot asymmetry. We suggest using the vi...

Which data to analyze, and how, are fundamental questions of all empirical research. As there are always numerous flexibilities in data-analytic decisions (a "garden of forking paths"), this poses perennial problems to all empirical research. Specification-curve analysis and multiverse analysis have recently been proposed as solutions to these issu...

Background Resilience refers to a class of variables that are highly relevant to wellbeing and coping with stress, trauma, and chronic adversity. Despite its significance for health, resilience suffers from poor conceptual integration. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a functional disorder with altered psychological stress reactivity and a brain-g...

Study protocol (English translation). (PDF)

ClinicalTrials.gov Registration. (PDF)

Study protocol (German). (PDF)

Srull and Wyer (1979) demonstrated that exposing participants to more hostility-related stimuli caused them subsequently to interpret ambiguous behaviors as more hostile. In their Experiment 1, participants descrambled sets of words to form sentences. In one condition, 80% of the descrambled sentences described hostile behaviors, and in another con...

The self-concept maintenance theory holds that many people will cheat in order to maximize self-profit, but only to the extent that they can do so while maintaining a positive self-concept. Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008, Experiment 1) gave participants an opportunity and incentive to cheat on a problem-solving task. Prior to that task, participants...

The Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) is a widely-used self-report instrument for the assessment of schizotypal personality traits. However, the factor structure of scores on English and non-English translations of the SPQ has been a matter of debate. With little previous factorial evaluation of the German version of the SPQ (SPQ-G), we r...

Background: For several decades, the question of whether personal suicidality is reflected in individual music preferences has been the subject of debate in suicide research. Despite many studies investigating the relationship between music use and suicidal behavior, it is still unclear whether suicide risk is reflected in individual music prefere...

It is common in practicing orthognathic surgery to evaluate faces with retruded or protruded chins (dysgnathic faces) using photographs. Because motion may alter how the face is perceived, we investigated the perception of faces presented via photographs and videos. Two hundred naïve raters (lay persons, without maxillo facial surgery background) e...

Stimulus as presented to the raters. (AVI)

The Dark Triad of personality (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy) is widely considered conceptually important for individual differences research into personality and interpersonal behavior. Recent research suggests to add trait sadism to its defining constructs (i.e., to form a Dark Tetrad), and that a single common dimension (the Dark Cor...

Abbreviations: 2D:4D = digit ratio; CI = confidence interval; F = female; FtM = female-to-male transgender; M = male; MtF = male-to-female transgender; TGI = transgender identity.

Humor and mental health are interconnected as is evidenced by a large number of studies. However, associations are only small and inconsistent as the operationalization of humor poses a methodological challenge. The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) differentiates four humor styles that might be beneficial or harmful to mental health. The aim of the...

While the conventional forest plot is useful to present results within subgroups of patients in clinical studies, it has been criticized for several reasons. First, small subgroups are visually overemphasized by long confidence interval lines, which is misleading. Second, the point estimates of large subgroups are difficult to discern because of th...

A considerable amount of research has been conducted on the aversive impact of prolonged interpersonal childhood trauma, but data on possible associations with motivational concepts (self-efficacy, self-esteem and locus of control) in adult survivors is scarce. The purpose of this study is to investigate specific coherences between childhood abuse...

The purpose of this study was to determine the associations between religion, suicidal behavior, attitudes and psychological distress in 5572 students from 12 countries by means of a self-report questionnaire. Our results showed that an affiliation with Islam was associated with reduced risk for suicide ideation, however affiliating with Orthodox C...

The Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief (SPQ-B) was developed with the aim of examining variations in healthy trait schizotypy, as well as latent vulnerability to psychotic-spectrum disorders. No previous study has studied the cross-cultural validity of the SPQ-B in a large cross-national sample. The main goal of the present study was to an...

In the last decade, clinical research on mindfulness and its positive effects on depression and anxiety have gained increased interest. Emotion regulation mediates the effects of mindfulness on mental health in clinical samples and among meditators. The present study examined whether these associations also generalize to the general population. Mul...