Interactions with Artificial Entities Reloaded: 20 Years of Research from a Social Psychological Perspective

Twenty years ago, we reflected on the potential of psychological research in the area of embodied conversational agents and systematized the variables that need to be considered in empirical studies. We gave an outlook on potential and necessary research by taking into account the independent variables behavior and appearance of the embodied agent, by referring to the dependent variables acceptance, efficiency and effects on behavior and summarizing moderating variables such as task and individual differences. Twenty years later, we now give an account on what has been found and how the field has developed – suggesting avenues for future research.

Rejection Sensitivity in Intimate Relationships

The goal of the study was to investigate whether and how perceptions of rejection are predictive of perceptions of the partner’s responsiveness, and the intimacy felt with a romantic partner, daily. Moreover, we examined whether people who are more anxious and sensitive to rejection perceived more rejection in daily life and whether this foreshadowed perception of the partner to be less responsive. Analyses of daily data from a sample of 75 couples ( N = 150) who reported on their daily relational experiences suggest that rejection sensitivity and rejection experiences play a significant role in couples’ felt intimacy in daily life, and specifically for perceptions of responsiveness. Results also indicate that for women, rejection sensitivity is associated with more rejection experiences. We discuss the current results from a clinical and from a social psychological perspective, and we highlight how anxious apprehension and experience of rejection, and its interpersonal consequences, can be further considered in clinical practice.

Radicalisation:A Social Psychological Perspective (Part III)

Radicalism and extremism have extremely serious consequences for human life and threaten the existence of humanity. The problem of deradicalisation is in the focus of our attention in this paper. The theory of uncertainty-identity describes the psychological mechanism by which the transformation of uncertainty into extremism occurs, by which a person experiencing a feeling of uncertainty, especially if this feeling is acute in its severity and is experienced for a long time, then the person tends not only to highly entitative, but to extremist groups. If this theory does not describe the mechanism of deradicalisation, then the conditions under which an individual, experiencing a feeling of uncertainty, still does not seek to become a member of groups with extremist and radical beliefs. This paper focuses on the analysis of these obstacles in the way towards extremism and radicalism. In addition, the potential of the social identity model of recovery formulated on the example of the social identity of addicts is discussed.

Lost by Definition: Why Boredom Matters for Psychology and Society

Long overlooked, boredom has drawn increasing attention across multiple subfields of psychology (including clinical, developmental, educational, cognitive, and industrial/organizational psychology), as well as economics, philosophy, neuroscience, and animal cognition. In this paper, we review and integrate this work by providing a social psychological perspective on boredom as an emotion, and its role in signaling the need for change to restore successful attention in meaningful activity. In doing so, we discuss the implications of that approach for understanding boredom cross-culturally and cross-species, and identify opportunities for targeted interventions to reduce boredom and improve well-being.