Quarantine and spatial distancing measures associated with COVID-19 resulted in substantial changes to individuals’ everyday lives. Prominent among these lifestyle changes was the way in which people interacted with media—including music listening. In this repeated assessment study, we assessed Australian university students’ media use throughout early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, and determined whether media use was related to changes in life satisfaction. Participants were asked to complete six online questionnaires, capturing pre- and during-pandemic experiences. The results indicated (...) that media use varied substantially throughout the study period, and at the within-person level, life satisfaction was positively associated with music listening and negatively associated with watching TV/videos/movies. The findings highlight the potential benefits of music listening during COVID-19 and other periods of social isolation. (shrink)

Images portraying exercise are commonly used to promote exercise behavior and to measure automatic associations of exercise (e.g., via implicit association tests). The effectiveness of these promotion efforts and the validity of measurement techniques partially rely on the untested assumption that the images being used are perceived by the general public as portrayals of exercise that is pleasant and motivating. The aim of this study was to investigate how content of images impacted people's automatic and reflective evaluations of exercise images. (...) Participants ( N = 90) completed a response time categorization task (similar to the implicit association test) to capture how automatically people perceived each image as relevant to Exercise or Not exercise. Participants also self-reported their evaluations of the images using visual analog scales with the anchors: Exercise / Not exercise, Does not motivate me to exercise / Motivates me to exercise, Pleasant / Unpleasant, and Energizing/Deactivating. People tended to more strongly automatically associate images with exercise if the images were of an outdoor setting, presented sport (as opposed to active labor or gym-based) activities, and included young (as opposed to middle-aged) adults. People tended to reflectively find images of young adults more motivating and relevant to exercise than images of older adults. The content of exercise images is an often overlooked source of systematic variability that may impact measurement validity and intervention effectiveness. (shrink)

Despite the advances made in understanding the effects of humiliation, no univocal position regarding its meaning exists. Indeed, so indiscreet is its meaning, the emotion is commonly conflated with other related emotions such as shame, embarrassment, and anger. Employing a scoping review design, this review aimed to scope the empirical literature concerning the meaning of humiliation from the perspective of two definitional parameters: i) status, subsuming the values descriptive and prescriptive, and ii) format, subsuming the values intension and extension. CINAHL, (...) EMBASE, EMCare, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and PubMed were searched for eligible studies. In total, twelve studies were synthesized in this review. Vis-à-vis status, seven studies were found to define humiliation prescriptively, and five, descriptively. Vis-à-vis format, seven studies defined humiliation intensionally, and five, extensionally. Accordingly, the meaning of humiliation varies in the literature. If further progress is to be made in humiliation studies, it is vital for researchers to be cognizant of the different meanings ascribed to humiliation. (shrink)