
Ulrich S TranUniversity of Vienna | UniWien · Department of Cognition Emotion and Methods in Psychology
Ulrich S Tran
PD DSc MSc
About
221
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
March 2008 - August 2011
September 2005 - January 2008
September 2004 - August 2008
Education
January 2016 - January 2016
October 2004 - November 2007
October 1998 - December 2003
Publications
Publications (221)
A growing body of evidence suggests that exposure to natural environments is associated with more positive body image, but such work has invariably centred the experiences of neurotypical adults and bodies. To rectify this oversight, we examined whether direct and indirect (i.e., mediational) pathways between nature exposure and an index of positiv...
Background
Core Premenstrual Disorders (PMDs), including Premenstrual Syndrome and Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, can cause significant impairment. Despite evidence of associations between stress and premenstrual symptoms, a systematic synthesis is lacking.AimsTo systematically review the literature and meta-analyse evidence on the relationship b...
Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) lead to improvements in mental health, and also increase trait mindfulness. Yet, trait mindfulness shows definitional and empirical overlaps with the personality dimension of neuroticism which is linked to mental health and is malleable through interventions as well. This meta-analysis examined whether previou...
Detachment from nature is contributing to the environmental crisis and reversing this trend requires detailed monitoring and targeted interventions to reconnect people to nature. Most tools measuring nature exposure and attachment were developed in high-income countries and little is known about their robustness across national and linguistic group...
Over the past few years, more attention has been paid to jingle and jangle fallacies in psychological science. Jingle fallacies arise when two or more distinct psychological phenomena are erroneously labeled with the same term, while jangle fallacies occur when different terms are used to describe the same phenomenon. Jingle and jangle fallacies em...
Terror Management Theory (TMT) proposes that when people are made aware of their own death, they are more likely to endorse cultural values. TMT is a staple of social psychology, being featured prominently in textbooks and the subject of much research. The implications associated with TMT are significant, as its advocates claim it can partially exp...
Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...
Previous evidence suggests that benefits of mindfulness‐based interventions (MBIs) may depend on individuals' baseline trait mindfulness (BTM) levels. This meta‐analysis investigated moderating effects of BTM on changes in mental health outcomes and trait mindfulness in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of MBIs. A total of 177 primary studies (to...
Objective
Mindfulness is frequently seen as a protective factor of stress, but self-report measures of mindfulness may overlap with other related constructs, such as mental health, and could thus not only be a predictor, but also an outcome of stress. This study thus aimed to examine the longitudinal bidirectional associations between the use and p...
Introduction
Gestalt perception refers to the cognitive ability to perceive various elements as a unified whole. In our study, we delve deeper into the phenomenon of Gestalt recognition in visual cubist art, a transformative process culminating in what is often described as an Aha moment. This Aha moment signifies a sudden understanding of what is...
Background: Different words used for suicide (so-called suicide referents) have different moral connotations, and neutral referents are recommended in media reporting guidelines. Aims: To assess how different referents in media reports are related to actual suicides. Method: Austrian news articles for each month between 2000 and 2021 (n = 276 month...
Previous work has supported direct, positive associations between body appreciation and positive mental health, but has largely neglected to examine possible indirect mechanistic pathways. Here, we propose one relevant mediational pathway, wherein body appreciation is associated with positive mental health via positive self-beliefs (i.e., cognition...
Transliminality refers to permeable mental boundaries that entail a susceptibility to, and awareness of, material from unconscious sources and the external environment. Here, we examined the extent to which transliminality is associated with the personality trait of Openness to Experience. Three samples of visitors to art galleries (total N = 770)...
Detachment from nature is contributing to the environmental crisis and reversing this trend requires detailed monitoring and targeted interventions to reconnect people to nature. Most tools measuring nature exposure and attachment were developed in high-income countries and little is known about their robustness across national and linguistic group...
Newly developed, web-based, open-repository concepts, such as community-augmented meta-analysis (CAMA), provide open access to fulfill the needs for transparency and timeliness of synthesized evidence. The main idea of CAMA is to keep meta-analyses up-to-date by allowing the research community to include new evidence continuously. In 2021, the Leib...
In diesem Beitrag beschreiben wir die Ergebnisse einer Metaanalyse, in der wir die Wirksamkeit von Fortbildungsprogrammen zu inklusiver Bildung untersucht haben. Wir analysieren, ob diese Programme das Wissen, die Fähigkeiten und Einstellungen von Lehrkräften sowie die Leistungen der Schülerinnen und Schüler verbessern und welche Faktoren Fortbildu...
The fraternal-birth order effect (FBOE) is a research claim which states that each older brother increases the odds of homosexual orientation in men via an immunoreactivity process known as the maternal immune hypothesis. Importantly, older sisters supposedly either do not affect these odds, or affect them to a lesser extent. Consequently, the frat...
The Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) is a widely used measure of a core facet of the positive body image construct. However, extant research concerning measurement invariance of the BAS-2 across a large number of nations remains limited. Here, we utilised the Body Image in Nature (BINS) dataset – with data collected between 2020 and 2022 – to asse...
In the present study, we sought to position support for weight-related anti-discrimination laws and policies within a broader political and socioeconomic context. Specifically, we hypothesised that individualistic (rather than structural) anti-poverty attitudes would provide the basis for negative weight-related dispositions. To test this hypothesi...
Inclusive education is a reform aimed at educating all students in general class- rooms, independent of diversity features such as special educational needs, gifted- ness, or migration. Its successful implementation requires teachers with professional knowledge about inclusive education, skills to address the diverse needs in the class- room, and p...
Empathy enables us to understand the emotions of others and is an important determinant of prosocial behavior. Investigating the relationship between mindfulness and empathy could therefore provide important insights into factors that promote interpersonal understanding and pathways that contribute to prosocial behavior. As prior studies have yield...
Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have a positive effect on biomarkers of inflammation and stress in patients with psychiatric disorders and physical illnesses. Regarding subclinical populations, results are less clear. The present meta-analysis addressed the effects of MBIs on biomarkers in psychiatric populations and among healthy, stressed,...
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...
Increased execution of replication studies contributes to the effort to restore credibility of empirical research. However, a second generation of problems arises: the number of potential replication targets is at a serious mismatch with available resources. Given limited resources, replication target selection should be well-justified, systematic...
Objectives
Previous meta-analyses suggested that mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) may have beneficial effects on telomere length (TL) and telomerase activity (TA), two biological markers of cellular aging and cell stress. The present review aimed to provide the most comprehensive synthesis of the available evidence to date and tested a number...
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: Over the last decades, mindfulness has become an important concept and topic for many professions and interventional research. While the number of available self-report scales and empirical studies on the concept of mindfulness has increased in recent years, some questions regarding its theoretical underpinnings still remain.
Objective:...
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...
Inclusive education is a reform aimed at educating all students in general classrooms, independent of diversity features such as special educational needs, giftedness, or migration. Its successful implementation requires teachers with professional knowledge about inclusive education, skills to address the diverse needs in the classroom, and positiv...
BACKGROUND
Mindfulness-based mobile applications have become popular tools for enhancing well-being in today’s fast-paced world. Their ability to reduce geographical, financial, and social barriers makes them a promising alternative to traditional interventions.
OBJECTIVE
As most available apps lack a theoretical framework, this review aims to eva...
Background
Mindfulness-based mobile apps have become popular tools for enhancing well-being in today’s fast-paced world. Their ability to reduce geographical, financial, and social barriers makes them a promising alternative to traditional interventions.
Objective
As most available apps lack a theoretical framework, this review aimed to evaluate th...
Increased execution of replication studies contributes to the effort to restore credibility of empirical research. However, a second generation of problems arises: the number of potential replication targets is at a serious mismatch with available resources. Given limited resources, replication target selection should be well-justified, systematic,...
Objective:
The aim of this study was to assess associations of various content areas of Twitter posts with help-seeking from the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (Lifeline) and with suicides.
Methods:
We retrieved 7,150,610 suicide-related tweets geolocated to the United States and posted between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2018. Using...
The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in t...
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...
Objectives
Mindfulness is associated with the different forms of motivation according to self-determination theory (intrinsic, identified, and external motivation, and amotivation). However, causal evidence for reported negative associations of mindfulness with external motivation and amotivation is currently lacking. Therefore, this study investig...
Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. These studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations in both healthy and clinical populations; however, they have suffered from several issues including generally low sample sizes and a la...
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...
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...
Meta-analyses suggest that mindfulness interventions have positive effects on mental health. Yet, how mindfulness interventions exert their effects is still largely unknown. Self-reported mindfulness may partially mediate the association between mindfulness interventions and change in self-reported mental health. We present the results of a novel a...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...