Ulrich S Tran

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

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...